Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #147777 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 220 pages

Synopsis
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, forgotten land-locked state in the Caucasus which had the misfortune to be of geopolitical importance. Chechnya re-iterated its largely Muslim claim to independence from Russia, one it had first made 150 years before. Then, of course, it had no knowledge of the importance of oil. A blitzkrieg was launched against the Chechens in 1994, so devastating as to reduce Grozny, the capital, to a city of rubble and rats, the Dresden of the Caucasus. There followed the systematic rape and murder of the people - men, women and children - by the Spetznatz, the Russian special forces. But the Chechens would not die. What is left in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, is a vision of hell in the eyes of the survivors - pictured by Stanley Greene - that seems impossible to contemplate. The horrific politics of Yeltsin and Putin are reasonably comprehensible, given their roles.

But what do the mothers of the Russian soldiers who have done this to Chechnya feel now about their sons?

Customer Reviews

A harrowing, very personal account
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.

a must
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.