Stanley Greene: Open Wound: Chechnya 1994 - 2003

a great book with greats photos, the text is as good as photos and when you will arrived at the last page you will not go out of this book without damages, i think that i 'm going to have an other view of this war in Chechnya, Mr Greene is a great photograph and simply a great man.

The cover image of Open Wound Chechnya might be described as the classic example of an establishing shot in a traditional photo-essay. Unsurprising perhaps when you read that, in 1971, Stanley Green spent a period working with W Eugene Smith: the photo-essay’s undoubted master. In this picture the eye is immediately drawn to the sillouette, or perhaps imprint, of a figure, lying legs and arms outstretched where it fell, amid the detritus of urban conflict. The abandoned shopping cart next to the shadow, that was once a presence, perhaps suggesting that we are looking at the outline, or memory, of a woman caught up in the conflict that came upon her daily life. The body lay where it fell for long enough to melt the snow beneath it and thus leave it’s outline in the street. It may be that this person was only wounded for, as is pointed out in the book, it was usually far too dangerous an undertaking to recover the bodies of civilian dead and they were simply left where they fell in the streets. By contrast the image may express a darker narrative for the wire hangs down from the telegraph pole in the right of the frame indicating the fate rebels can expect when caught by Russian troops: there is no Geneva Convention in Chechnya.Open Wound Chechnya is a harrowing, very personal account inspired and powered by the sheer anger of the photographer. It fits into that category coined by Martin Bell: “the Journalism of Attachement” in which, rather than trying to provide the unobtainable objective approach, an issue is presented, identifying it as fundamentally wrong and demanding notice be taken of it in the broader world. The pictures that appear in this book are not for the squeamish, but they are very far from a simple bloodfest. They were made over a period of nine years and have been edited down from a vast number, at the back of the book the viewer is also presented with Green’s handwritten diary, reproductions of his contact sheets and notes on his own views about photojournalism. Initially I was irritated by the quotations that take the place of captions on many of the pages when reading the book from the front; much fuller captions are however listed at the back for each image, although we still learn nothing of the imprinted figure in the cover photograph.But in her, or his, anonymity she, or he, might serve as a memory of a past humanity before war came to a town called Grozny.

Book is very good but my copy had half the pages missing as pages 66-80 were repeated twice and pages 81-96 were completely missing. What I have is part of a book, but I paid for a full book.

There's not a lot I can say about this. The photographs are brilliant. The subject is grim. Greene has a unique ability to convey the emotions of people in unimaginably horrible circumstances.Buy this for the remarkable photographs, and to learn something about a conflict that was almost entirely unreported in the US. Don't buy it if you're easily upset.

Credo che basti il suo nome a definirne la qualità del lavoro, Stanley Greene è uno dei più capaci fotografi al mondo.E questo libro ne è la riprova.Fotografie dure, crude che arrivano dritte al punto e con una grande capacità di raccontare senza fronzoli estetici una realtà che è stata quella del conflitto russo ceceno. Un lavoro a lungo termine veramente completo che dimostra come il fermarsi nei luoghi e poter tornare spesso faccia la differenza nel produrre un lavoro complesso ed esaustivo (almeno in parte).Molto interessante la sequenza con il quale il libro è costruito, la parte finale con i diari di Stanley è veramente interessantissima per misurare il suo legame e il suo interesse in ciò che stava facendo.

チェチェン紛争（戦争）の傷跡をモノクロ写真を中心に収めています。後半にある，フィルムと直筆の取材メモが，生々しさを伝えています。この写真を使うとか使わないという印の付いたフィルムを見ていると，写真という「切り取られた一瞬」の背後には，いつ絶えるともわからない「戦争の日常」があることに気づかされます。

Stanley Greene è davvero uno dei grandissimi, anche se, spesso, non compare tra gli illustri credo che la sua fotografia sia uno dei migliori connubi tra capacità di raccontare e valenza estetica. Un ottimo acquisto!

as an admire of war photography and history this book has both a real look at what a battleground looks like and how people cope with such difficult situations. the author puts together some of the most compelling photographs from one of the worst conflict of the 20th and 21st century.