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Stanley Greene: Black Passport (USA)
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February 25 - March 15
Meglinskaya Gallery 
“I think you can only do this for eight years. For eight years you can still keep the positive. If you stay at it longer than eight years, you turn. And not into a beautiful butterfly." - Stanley Greene says. "You really turn. I see it in myself, I see it in all my friends and colleagues. I mean they are all victims of post trauma. We’re not the beautiful butterflies anymore.We become moths. We’re like moths flying to the flame. You know, sometimes your wings get singed or you just burn up. Get killed. Or you burn up inside. The drugs and the alcohol and the party and all of this is to push it away, push it away.” Every day the newspapers and magazines are full of photographs depicting war and oppression. But the life of a war photographer is also a fascinating story. For what motivates someone to be confronted with death and misery? To do your work while risking your own life, sometimes literally amidst flying bullets? Does a war photographer see it as a task to lend a voice to the oppressed of the world?
Black Passport is the biography of the life of war photographer Stanley Greene. It shows Greene’s war images alternated with private images. The viewer makes acquaintance with Stanley’s friends, his wife (later ex-wife), his female friends and his colleagues. Just as Greene himself, the viewer experiences being tossed to and from between the safe western life and the horrors of wars elsewhere. What effect does this work – the confrontation with horrors – have on his character? How does it influence his relationships, his loved ones and friends?
The basis of Black Passport is, in addition to the photography, a long monologue by Greene. Teun van der Heijden has put this monologue together from rough material that was the result of eight extended interviews, and is presented as a film script, in 26 short scenes. The scenes do not form a sequential story, but are a kaleidoscope of Greene’s key experiences.
Stanley studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and at the Image Works in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An encounter with W. Eugene Smith turned his energies to photojournalism. Stanley began photographing for magazines, and worked as temporary staff photographer for the New York Newsday. In 1986 he moved to Paris.
Having started out as a fashion photographer in Paris, and after publishing a book on Paris night life, the black American photographer from New York wanted to move into the direction of documentary photography. In a time of massive changes such as the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall, he travelled through the former Eastern bloc and took photographs in the Caucusus.
At the start of the ’90s, he thus found himself in the middle of the Chechnya War, the conflict that Greene was to follow for more than ten years. It became a personal mission for him, which resulted in 2004 in the book Open Wound. It became Greene’s epos about the Chechnyan people and its oppression, and made his name better known among a broader audience. Greene has since documented virtually all the hot spots in the world.
Stanley Greene was a long-time member of the renowned photo agency l’Agence Vu. He is one of the founders and part-owners of the recently founded photo agency Noor.
Find out more about Stanley Greene on www.noorimages.com
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