American. Born in New York in 1949. For the last 25 years, Stanley Greene (New York, 1949) bore witness to births of new dawns, rising and falling empires, invasions of countries, liberations of others, mass migrations, deportations, displacements, famines, conflicts, wars and destructions. He worked on the five continents trying to document the human condition. “Sometimes I wonder if societies just lust for tragedies.”
As a teenager, he was a member of the Black Panthers, an anti-Vietnam War activist and later a founding member of SF Camerawork, an exhibition space for avant-garde photography in San Francisco.
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 and, by chance, he was on hand to record the fall of the Berlin Wall, which made him a much-sought-after photojournalist.
While working for the Paris-based photo agency Agence Vu in October 1993, he was trapped and almost killed in the White House in Moscow during a coup attempt against President Boris Yeltsin. He made a great impression with the photo book "Open Wound: Chechnya 1994-2003", published by Trolley.
Stanley has covered the war-torn countries Nagorno-Karabakh, Iraq, Somalia, Croatia, Kashmir, Afghanistan, and Lebanon, amongst others and won five World Press Photo Awards for his work around the world and is a recipient of the Eugene Smith Humanistic Grant and numerous other awards. Stanley was awarded a Katrina Media Fellowship from the Open Society Institute in 2006.
The successful book “Black Passport”, photographed and lived by Stanley, compiled by Teun van der Heijden, was published in 2009 and published by Schilt Publishing, Amsterdam.
In the summer of 2010, to mark the fifth commemoration of Hurricane Katrina, Stanley exhibited images of Katrina’s devastation and the aftermath in a truck-exhibition that drove from Houston to New Orleans in collaboration with Kadir van Lohuizen.
Stanley continues to cover important world events and recently followed the trail of electronic waste to Nigeria, India, China and Pakistan; a project realized with the support of the Getty Images Grants for Editorial Photography, GEO France and exhibited at the international photojournalism festival Visa pour l'Image 2012.
Noor Agency
Book sold out American Photography Awards ; selected as one of the ten best photography books of the year. World Press Photo 2004; awarded in the Daily Life Story category Trolley Books (2003) French version 220 pages 27 x 24 cm ISBN: 978-1-904563-01-3
André Frère Editions (2013) Photographs and texts by Stanley Greene Size : 34,5 x 24,5 cm 176 pages - Hardcover ISBN: 979-10-92265-03-3
The signed book, limited to 15 copies, includes an original 18 x 24 cm silver print signed, numbered and entitled Grozny, January 1995. Trolley Books (2003)220 pages27 x 24 cmISBN: 978-1-904563-01-3