Giving Back.(war photography)

Photographer Stanley Greene sees himself as a witness to life, and the pictures he takes as evidence of its capriciousness. For the past 10 years he has observed the war in Chechnya, and the evidence--now on display in Paris--is among the most disturbing in the annals of war photography. Greene, who has contributed photographs to NEWSWEEK, has just published "Open Wound: Chechnya 1994-2003" (229 pages. Trolley), a collection of 81 often brutal images of the destruction of a land and its people. Accompanying the photos are candid excerpts from Greene's journal and news reports of the conflict--as well as a list of the 42 reporters and photographers who have died there--giving the disturbing visuals an even darker voice. An exhibition of these pictures is showing at Galerie VU in Paris (through March 13).

Greene's work is a grim record of a conflict deeply rooted in Soviet history. Chechen resistance to Russian domination dates back to 1800, when the Russian Empire moved to conquer the Caucasus. The latest flare-up occurred after the fall of communism; in 1994 Russian President Boris Yeltsin sent troops to Chechnya to suppress a burgeoning independence movement. "Now we will have 100 years of war," Greene recalls a rebel's telling him then. "Blood for blood."

Since then Greene has visited the region 20 times. His pictures reflect a fierce and gruesome struggle: a wall dissected by a line of blood and bullet holes, mangled civilian corpses on the snowy streets, a skinny boy dressed only in briefs watching through a stone wall for Russian forces. More than 300,000 of Chechnya's 1 million people have died since the war began, and Greene's images are unabashedly from the Chechen point of view. "I have been accused of having lost my objectivity," he says. "But when you sit on a fence and watch genocide without doing anything about it, you are as guilty as those who are committing it."

Greene, 54, traveled a circuitous path to the battlefields of Chechnya. He was born and raised in Harlem, where his father was an actor and a labor-rights activist who was eventually blacklisted for communist sympathies. Greene's parents gave him his first camera when he was 11. They also gave him their sense of political duty: as a teen, he protested the Vietnam War and joined the Black Panthers.

In 1971 he met the renowned photojournalist W. Eugene Smith, who became his mentor and advised him to study photography at New York's School of Visual Arts. A ...