Picture Stories by Stephen Alvarez: Stanley Greene's Black Passport

Green

Black Passport

Stanley Greene and Teun van der Heijden

Aperture 2010

Let me say two things right of the bat.

1, I’m no war photographer. I’ve worked in war zones and I’m no stranger to the thrill of photographing something that might well kill you. But as for shooting war for war? It is not my particular drug. It is, however, Stanley Greene’s drug of choice. He returns to it over and over, making his pictures but loosing a part of himself each time.

2, I don’t know Stanley Green.

But after spending some time with his new book Stanley Greene: Black Passport I feel like I do know Stanley. More than that, I feel like we’ve been out all night drinking and carousing and he has laid his soul bare in some late night/early morning booze and dope fueled intimacy.

That is what Greene and Tuen van der Heijden have done in this book, laid Stanley’s soul bare.

Black Passport isn’t a retrospective or a memoir, it is a confession. It is a confession to a life spent pursuing photographs above all else. I spoke about obsession yesterday. No one holds a candle to Stanley Greene in the obsession department. He calls it commitment but it is well beyond that.

If you put war photographers on a spectrum Nachtwey would inhabit the light end and Greene would live in the dark.

Natchwey can make perfect photos of people suffering. Greene cannot. With Stanley’s photos you feel the despair intimately but there is no prettiness to them. He shows war in all its naked horror, all the time, 24/7/ There is no respite, no reprieve, it doesn’t stop.

Looking through Stanley’s photos I feel all the things that I feel in a war zone. Despair, confusion, adrenaline. I can smell his photographs. They are that real. That is why I have always respected his work so much. Greene never lets the viewer or himself off the hook.

I can tell he cares deeply about his subjects but won’t romanticize them. Suffering is suffering, death is death. There is no nobility in suffering, there are no lessons learned, no closure, no greater good. He is equally honest about the personal cost of covering war.

Black Passport is a tale of broken relationships and shattered expectations, guilt. There is a price paid for looking into other people’s horror. Greene has paid it.

There is something romantic about Greene’s life, but romantic in a Tom Waites or Charles Bukowski way. And I am sure that much like young people think Romeo and Juliet is about romance young photographers will miss that point here. If you are going to do this work, it will cost you dearly.

Buy the book. It is fantastic.

-Stephen Alvarez

Madison, WI