Stanley Greene obituary

“I don’t like the word ‘photojournalism’. It’s been bastardised,” Stanley Greene told an interviewer in 2010. “I am comfortable with the idea of being a photographer, just being a photographer. I don’t want to be an artist; I want to be a photographer. That’s what I do.”

Greene, who has died aged 68 after being treated for cancer, was a charismatic photojournalist of the old school, dismissive of digital technology and committed to shooting on film both as an aesthetic and an ethical principle. “By shooting film, you are forced to really think about what you are photographing,” he said recently. “You have to have a dialogue between you and the subject.”

The acclaimed images he shot, often at close hand, in Chechnya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Rwanda and Serbia, as well as in post-Katrina New Orleans, are testament to that commitment and to his belief that photography was a way of making sense of the world and, in doing so, helping to change it for the better.

He was born in Brooklyn, New York. His parents, Stanley and Javotee, both actors and political activists, gave him his first camera when he was 11. In the 1950s, his father had been blacklisted as a communist for his union activism. As a teenager, Stanley Jr joined the Black Panthers, having attended many anti-Vietnam war protests and marches. “I was attracted to the Panthers by the berets and leather jackets,” he later recalled. His teenage years were marked by bouts of depression that led to a two-year stint in a psychiatric unit.

In the early 1970s, having tried unsuccessfully to make a living as a painter, Greene landed a job as assistant to the great American photojournalist W Eugene Smith, an intense apprenticeship that deeply informed Greene’s attitude and approach to photography. Smith’s formal discipline was matched by a dedication that was all-consuming.

“He was a great photographer. He was a humanitarian. But he also had a lot of demons,” Greene would attest. “He was obsessed ... I never saw Gene Smith sleep.”

Something of that obsession rubbed off on Greene, alongside a rock’n’roll style – sunglasses, silver skull rings, neckerchiefs, flowing scarves – and attitude: “I wanted to be a musician. I wanted to be Jimi Hendrix, but when I heard Jimi Hendrix, I realised I could never touch him.” One of his early projects, The Western Front, chronicled the punk scene in San Francisco in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Having shot editorials for various New York magazines, Greene moved to Paris in 1986, where, he later said, “I was a dilettante, sitting in cafes, taking pictures of girls and doing heroin.” In 1989, aged 40 and having overcome his drug habit, he belatedly found his calling as a photojournalist by shooting one of the defining images of the fall of the Berlin Wall: a young punk girl atop the wall, wearing a tutu and clutching a champagne bottle.

In the early 90s, he covered the southern Sudan famine and travelled to Bhopal, India, to chronicle the aftermath of the Union Carbide gas poisoning. Another turning point came when he was photographing starving children in Mali in the early 1990s. “I photographed them as I would a fashion model,” he later wrote, “but they taught me a lesson. You have to take photographs from the heart and not from the head.”

Soon after, Greene joined the Paris-based Vu agency and, on assignment in Moscow in October 1993, he was trapped in the Russian White House and almost killed when tanks opened fire on the building during the violent stand-off between President Boris Yeltsin and the parliament. He covered conflicts in Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Somalia and Croatia.

In 1995, he travelled to Chechnya as the Russian army bombed Grozny. “There are stories that get to you so deeply that you have to get them out – and this was mine,’’ he said later, after his book Open Wound: Chechnya 1994 to 2003 was published in 2004. It remains the work that best encapsulates what Greene believed photojournalism should be: an amalgam of visceral images of the conflict and its aftermath, extended captions, essays, first-hand testimonies, newspaper reports and a chronology of Chechen history from 1800 to 2003. The book also records the names and biographies of 42 journalists and photographers who lost their lives in Chechnya during that time.

He was never an impartial photographer; Open Wound was driven by Greene’s sorrow, rage and impotence at what he witnessed.

“Grozny is like visions of a Goya painting, Disasters of War,” he said. “There are 70 or 80 corpses in the streets of Grozny. It’s wet and cold and I’m here to photograph, but I can’t when I see dogs eating the faces of the dead.” He returned to Chechnya many times. “The battle of Grozny has marked me forever,” he wrote.

In 2007, he founded the Amsterdam-based Noor photo agency and foundation – “an abiding commitment to the fundamental power of photography to bear witness to the struggle for human rights and social justice”.

In 2010, Aperture published Black Passport, which they described as an “autobiographical monograph-cum-scrapbook”. In it, Greene reflected on his life and work in a characteristically self-questioning way, interrogating the role of the photojournalist in the news industry and giving an impression of his personal life through the testimonies of friends and former lovers. “I think you can only keep positive for eight years,” he admitted. “If you stay at it longer than that, you turn. And not into a beautiful butterfly.”

His work appeared in Newsweek, Libération, the New York Times magazine, Stern and Paris Match. He won five World Press awards and in 2004 was awarded the W Eugene Smith Grant for his work in Chechnya and the Caucasus.

He is survived by a brother.