OPEN WOUND

a photo book by Stanley Greene

Suburbs of Grozny, January 1995

"After the bombing Grozny looked like a Goya painting: bodies and blood, the Death with the scythe, devastation, help-me screams and sub-humans groans". Stanley Green, born in New York in 1949, has been to Chechnya at least 20 times between 1994 and 2003. In the Caucasus he covered the ethnic cleansing and extermination of a people. A War that had little geopolitical and economic interest to the West, systematically ignored by news media and, as a result, nearly erased from Western consciences.

Open Wound is a collection of 81 powerful images, almost all of them in black & white, organized in a filmic sequence not to please the industry or the photographer's eyes but, as Greene says, to "reach the public and to show respect to the humanity I faced in Chechnya". Some of the images are best seen collectively, page after page. Others, the most powerful, are masterpieces by themselves: a corpse left in the dirty snow for fear of snipers, Markha and her artificial limbs sitting on a neatly tucked bed, Grozny's central market and the life that goes on no-matter-what. 

This isn't simply a reportage photography book, but a loud voice against Wars and Hate.

Text from French philosopher Andre' Glucksmann and Christian Caujolle.

Prospekt Podeby, Grozny, November 1995

Rebels were hanged here from telephone wires by the Russian infantry.

Stanley Greene was born in New York in 1949. He discovered photography 20 years later when he meets Eugene Smith and begins traveling with him. In 1975 he founds Camera Gallery in San Francisco, and he's part of Photography and Language Art Movement, with Wegman and Witkins. He has been published on several magazines, as: Liberation, NYT Magazine, Stern, Paris Match, Newsweek, Times.

Grozny, July 1996

Today Markha lives in Grozny with her father and sister.

Open Wound is published by Trolley and distributed by Phaidon Press; has 81 images and 229 pages.

Buy the book at Amazon.com.

Grozny, November 1995

The central market is a magnet for scavangers and black marketeers.

Hawkers sell condoms, vodka and guns while exchanging money at inflationary rates.

all images © Stanley Greene