Stanley Greene: Open Wound: Chechnya 1994-2003

by Stanley Greene (Photographer), Christian Caujolle, Andre Glucksmann

Overview

The collapse of Russian communism in 1991 resounded to the shudder of an empire. Soviet imperialism and empiricism was dead and lands, nations, and peoples would henceforth be free from the tyranny of the communist diktat. But it also sounded the death knell of a small, impoverished, and forgotten land-locked state in the Caucasus which had the misfortune to be of geopolitical importance. Stanley Greene's photographs in Open Wound are so powerful as to make Chechnya our responsibility. He is unashamed to use guilt, with his painter's eye, to relate the deeds of men in Chechnya to our own conduct.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781904563013
Publisher:	Trolley Books
Publication date:	07/15/2004
Pages:	220
Product dimensions:	10.87(w) x 9.75(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Stanley Greene was born in New York in 1949. Twenty years later he picked up a camera. By 1994 he found himself in Chechnya, in the Caucasus, amid the systematic extermination of a people and their country. In Open Wound he has shown the story of the Chechen rebellion through his eyes, necessarily clouded by one man's love for another.

Editorial Reviews

Chechnya is a distant but persistent horror. It is also an enigma: a remnant of the Soviet Union fighting a ragtag war for independence, it is also home to many fundamentalist Muslims seeking a wider war of terror. Its war is a particularly violent and inhumane battle fueled by relentless hatreds. Taking sides is difficult, but American-born photographer Greene does so with ease, favoring the Chechen rebels in his text and his choice of subjects for this photographic look at a decade of a war that has no end in sight. Greene's 81 (mostly b&w) photographs are grainy and raw, showing that life is cheap in a place where the principal city, Grozny, and many villages are rubble, occupied by edgy squatters, rebels, and Russian troops fighting with a random and deadly choreography for survival and control. The images of the Chechen wounded or dead, followed by brief text accounts of their suffering, place the photographs in the context of war. Also included are a brief chronology of Chechnya from 1800 to 2003, a list of 42 journalists who have died or disappeared there, and a glossary of images with detailed captions. Recommended.-David Bryant, New Canaan P.L., CT Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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