Stanley Greene, 61, is a founding member of Noor Images, a photography collective, agency and foundation in Amsterdam. His books include the autobiographical “Black Passport” and “Open Wound: Chechnya 1994-2003.” He won the W. Eugene Smith Grant in 2003. Michael Kamber spoke with him in Paris in May. Their remarks have been condensed.



Q.

What is it that you wanted to say with “Black Passport”?

A.

I wanted to set the record straight. I kept hearing people say, “Chechnya was when you really started to be a photographer.” And that’s not true. I was shooting back at the Berlin Wall, but nobody knew about it. I fell through the cracks. I wanted a way to say that my influences are not the ones you think they are. They are about painting. They are about music. They are about other things. The way I’ve been shooting really hasn’t changed since back in the ’70s, before all these new photographers emerged. My old work, like rock and roll, really nails it.

I found my vision way before Chechnya, it’s just that you didn’t know about it; the public didn’t know about it. Louis Faurer is an amazing photographer, but he fell through the cracks. Robert Frank used his dark room, and obviously Robert Frank looked at his pictures. They were friends. But Louis Faurer fell through the cracks. He was a great photographer and a great printer. Frank was hanging out with Bill Brandt, and he was hanging out in Paris with Man Ray and others. It’s the same if you look at Garry Winogrand, Roy DeCarava and Lee Friedlander.

Q.

Theirs is not a dark vision?

A.

Theirs is not a dark vision. It was a way of looking at pictures. At that point, pictures were being looked at in a very classical way. I think that World War II rattled everything, from photography to music to literature to painting to sculpture to film. Everything got rattled.

These guys came back and they had seen war. They had seen death. And their whole mindset — the abstract painters — they came back with those slashes of reds and blacks. And, of course, photography got rattled as well. It’s obvious everything got shaken up. But up until that point, you had this very still, very classical, very beautiful photography, taking nothing away from Ansel Adams and Minor White.

Q.

The 1950s were Chevrolets and hot dogs and the man in the gray flannel suit. Then you have all this really dark photography beginning to take shape.

A.

Gene Smith’s dark vision was lurking. And then after the war, it just blew out.

Q.

Tell me about Eugene Smith.

A.

He was a great photographer. He was a humanitarian. But he also had a lot of demons. He did drugs — he did a lot of drugs — and he drank and he was obsessed. I understand obsession. And Gene became obsessed.

The greatest story is when the person who took care of his house, Hattie, came to the city to tell him to try and get some money because she was supporting his family in upstate New York. She had to come down. Gene was just so consumed with looking for his vision and printing and everything, he totally ignored his whole family, to the point that Gene went nuts.

Q.

You worked for him?

A.

Yeah, I worked for him. He was obsessed. If you were in the studio, Gene would be up. And no matter what time you left, when you came back in the morning, Gene would be up. I never saw Gene Smith sleep. At the same time, we are now pulling back the onion skin and looking at him a little bit harder, especially with the digital issue.

Michael Kamber

There is a big debate going on right now about RAW files. People say your negative is a RAW file, and you are manipulating your pictures in the darkroom. I am not. All that information is on my negative.

Well, they say, all that information is in the RAW files. But if you alter an image and you change the hues, that’s manipulation. I am sorry; I can’t do that with a black-and-white negative. I can only manipulate for the shadows. And they throw out Gene Smith and his printing. When journalists start to distort reality, then I have a real problem with it. And when everything starts to look like a cartoon, I have a problem with it.

Q.

Are you saying that there is too much Photoshop going on?

A.

Way too much. And with [Photoshop] CS5, it is going be worse. Imagine. There is this setting now in CS5 where you can remove the horse and there will be no ghost. It’s scary. Even on the Leica M9, there is a setting that says, “Vintage black and white.” Photographers are photographing in color and printing in black and white. I was trained: if you shoot in color, you are looking at color. That’s it!

I think digital is great — for color. I don’t think it’s great for black and white. I think it’s just too much manipulation. It’s not real. There is this kind of grayness. I still don’t get the blacks I want without taking it to such an extreme that it becomes a cartoon of its former self.

Q.

Let’s face it, a lot of photojournalists now have full-time assistants who do nothing but Photoshop their images. But you are not saying that these photojournalists are inserting objects into the frame or removing objects from the frame; it’s mostly burning and dodging, right?

A.

No, I am saying they are putting things into the frame and taking things out of the frame. Absolutely. I definitely think they are doing that. You have a bucket or a chair in the original picture and all of sudden the color changes because it goes better with the form.

I have always loved the Afghanistan pictures that I have seen that have been Photoshopped. I mean, all of a sudden, Afghanistan has clouds. Every time I’ve been to Afghanistan, it’s been a flat sky. But all of a sudden, you’ve got God skies. Where did those come from? All of a sudden we’ve got colors that we didn’t even know existed.

Q.

You can make the case that someone like Alex Webb was underexposing Kodachrome 20 years ago, printing Cibachromes from it and getting vibrant colors.

A.

But I can say that when you look at his slide, all that information is in that slide. It’s not in the computer. It is on the slide. You can’t change that. The information is all in the slide. Just like the information is all on my negative. I cannot change it.

Q.

I was at World Press Photo last week, and half the stuff looks like it was shot through a toilet paper roll. It’s so heavily burned around the edges and and desaturated. It has these really heavy blacks. There is a whole look, a whole style, that’s taking over.

A.

It’s really taking hold. The problem is that when people win World Press, young photographers say: “Oh, I’ve got to do that. I’ve got to be part of that.”

Q.

Do you think that we need to go back to shooting film again? Do you think we need go back to when there was a purist approach to photojournalism?

A.

Yeah. I also think we are going to have more pictures from the 20th century than we are going to have from the 21st, because everything is getting deleted. Digital is not real. I can touch a negative. I can’t touch digital. When you have to back something up with 15 hard drives, doesn’t that rattle something?

And also, when you shoot digital, you can chimp; you can look at the image on the camera. Imagine Cartier-Bresson if he was trying to take a picture and all of a sudden he looked down. He would lose that next moment. A really good combat photographer chimping in the middle of the field could get a bullet in his head. I am surprised that no one has been shot yet.

But by shooting film, you are forced to really think about what you are photographing. You have to have a dialogue between you and the subject. When I shoot, I shoot from every angle possible because I am a super insecure photographer. And when I am shooting film, I am even more insecure. I push the envelope on trying to get the right shot, but I also think it through. With digital, there is a moment where you say: “Oh, I got it. What the hell.”

I think that we have no choice but to go back to shooting film because we have to get back to some kind of integrity. I think we are losing the moral code. And I think that in the end with film — yes, you can manipulate it and yes, you can change some things — there is still a moral code.

Anyway, I like shooting film. I have a thousand rolls of Kodachrome. But the fear I have every day is, “When I am going to get that golden assignment where I can actually go shoot the Kodachrome, then ship it off to Kansas and still hope that they are still processing it?” I am waiting. Any day now, they are going to say, “It’s all over.” But they said that about Polaroid, and now Polaroid is coming back with a vengeance.

Q.

I have been hearing this from a lot of older photographers: that the young photographers today are technically amazing, they have learned what an amazing photograph looks like, but they sometimes lack a variety of influences or a certain humanity.

A.

They don’t have humanity. They are definitely much better technically. They know that backwards and forwards. And they should. It’s their generation. But at the same time, because of all that technology, they are losing the humanity.

When we get to the point where we start digging up graves to make photographs, I think we are in trouble. When we get to the point where a woman is standing there with a bucket, trying to hold her guts in, and we are trying to get the right frame, and chimping at the same time we are doing it, we are in trouble. “Wait a minute, I need to take this picture, but I need to do an interview with you, but also, I need to shoot some video. Do you think you could keep that bucket there and maybe a little bit more, so we could see the blood running out?” And she is just shell-shocked.

Q.

Where did you see that?

A.

In Georgia.

Q.

Do you think that young photographers need to get away from the computer and start looking at other influences?

A.

First thing, I think that photographers need to get away from the computer and get out and walk around the communities that they photograph. I think that a lot of photographers are taking nothing away.

And there is a thing called disaster tourism. That is disgusting. I am sorry. But that is disgusting: to bring people, like they are going to the zoo, and show them how to take pictures.

“That is the job of a journalist, to upset your morning.” — Stanley Greene

I think that when you arrive in a place, you need to sniff the air. You need to take your finger, stick it up and see where the wind is blowing. You need to be able to communicate with people. You should know a language. But even if you don’t know a language, you should at least be decent enough to understand what you are about to photograph, instead of just going, “Pow, pow, pow.” Because when you do that, then you are a vulture, and then you are what a lot of N.G.O.’s call us: “Merchants of misery.”

But if you take the time and really get an understanding of what the story is about, you will come away with an experience. It won’t be just for some World Press Award. It will be: “I understand what these people are going through, and I think we should do something about it.”

Because I think — at the end of the day — we have to be diplomats. I don’t like the word “photojournalism.” It’s been bastardized. 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. And a photographer is someone who looks at the world and tries to make some sense of it for themselves, and for everyone else. And that’s what I want to do.

When I do a story, I go there and I try to understand what is going on. I’ll try to research it before going. I become passionate. It gets under my skin and I get a little bit obsessed. I have a problem with just dashing off to a place because there is violence and death and destruction and we think it’s going to help our career. There is a whole young group of photographers who work with that mindset, and the problem with that is that they give all of us a bad name.

Q.

But do you think that somebody, a young person, could look at your book — there are a lot of beautiful women and a lot of death in your book — and get the wrong idea? Or feel like this is some romantic view of what my life will be like if I follow Stanley Greene?

A.

No, I try to deflate that image. When you realize that you have been with these women and you have left them and broken their hearts — and look, let’s be real here. I don’t own an apartment. I don’t own a house. I don’t own a car. I don’t have any stocks and bonds. All I own are my cameras. That’s it. And some cowboy boots.

If you want to be a success financially, please don’t follow this path.

A lot of the stories I did, I financed. I am not a good business person. I didn’t know how to negotiate with a magazine. I just simply said, “Please give me this story, and give me the go-ahead to go do it.” Or in some cases, “If I do it, and I get the pictures and I send it to you, send me money.” And that is the generation I come out of.

I live from hand to mouth. I am one of the founders of Noor. There are three agencies today: there is Magnum, there is Noor and there is VII. I have a lot of respect for VII, but I really think we are the second agency, and we did it in three years. When you say you are a founder and owner of Noor, people expect you to be rich, but we’re not. Because we are really committed to doing what we are doing and we have made sacrifices to make that happen.

And we are going to continue to make sacrifices to allow that to happen. In the end, it isn’t about money. You want to have enough money so that you can go and eat a nice meal, and you can take your family on a fairly reasonable vacation. But then you have another level, where you don’t even think about that — where you just think about the next story. How do we get the money to go do the next story?

Q.

Right. But partially because of this, photographers are doing workshops and are doing N.G.O. work. They are finding different ways. They are not out trying to do fresh photo essays that they can sell to magazines. They are putting their energies into other things to make money.

A.

I’m glad you brought up N.G.O.’s, because that has become a real game. Like we work for these N.G.O.’s, right? It’s advertising, so that they can raise money and they can continue to do the good that they do. We get all upset if a photographer shoots for Shell or BP. But when we think in terms of photographing for certain nonprofit organizations who have a lot of money, and we become their spokesperson, we start to lose our objectivity.

Q.

Right, but what should our role be as photojournalists working for them?

A.

We have to be objective; we have to accept that. For example, when I worked for Human Rights Watch, they would take my pictures and sell them to raise money. What I always admired about Corinne Dufka is that she was a great photographer. And she quit and has literally become an investigator for Human Rights Watch. I think we have to be investigators.

Q.

So you’re saying that when we are working for N.G.O.’s, we may try and please the people we are working for instead of acting as true journalists?

Stanley Greene/Noor

A.

Exactly. And that happens a lot — more than people will admit. Because you figure: “They are paying for a place for us to sleep. They are giving us vehicles to get around in. Well, then, we are certainly not going to go out and criticize them. And we know what they expect to see.”

Q.

How is this different than working for a magazine, which also expects to see something?

A.

A magazine editor who hires me better understand that I am going to try and show you the truth. Some of my photos were just too hard to look at. But the truth of the matter was the picture of dead Americans in Falluja was going to run against an advertisement and the advertising people said: “No, no, no. Dead American bodies? Uh oh. No, no, no. Burnt lines? No, not like that.” And in the end, Time magazine ran it in Pictures of the Year, you know? It was made for Newsweek, but it ran in Time.

Q.

Because it was causing a problem with the editors? Or advertisers?

A.

Yeah, but I shot the picture. I certainly didn’t say: “Would the advertisers be upset if I show dead Americans — burnt, being beaten and tossed down the street? And then hung under a bridge and cut down?”

Q.

Do we need to see images like that as Americans? There have been almost no images of dead Americans published.

A.

We need to see it because it’s reality. We go to the movies, and we look at violence splashed across the screen like spaghetti sauce. If we can’t stomach watching our men and women being killed in these situations, then we shouldn’t send them there to be killed in such gruesome ways. We can’t have it both ways.

You want to sit there comfortably with your newspaper and blueberry muffin, and you don’t want to see pictures that are going to upset your morning. That is the job of a journalist, to upset your morning. The problem with newspapers and magazines folding is that the investigative journalism is going to disappear. And these criminals doing these nasty and dirty things in the world are going to get away with it.

Q.

Let me come back to the book. You said Eugene Smith and Louis Faurer were mentally ill. Do you think that there is a link between great photojournalists and mental illness?

A.

Well, I think you have to be nuts to do this job. I think you have to be a monk. I think it just takes too much out of you. Anybody who wants to be with you has got to be super strong, because there is just too much, too much that is going on in your head. There is too much going on in your life.

I did two years in a mental hospital. I know what crazy is, so now I am just controlling my craziness. I think that everyone else should at least acknowledge that they are nuts. I acknowledge that I am quite out there. But I am out there to a point where I found a way to control it, and I found a way to channel it so that I can still function.

Q.

When were you institutionalized?

A.

When I was 15.

Q.

And why did you include the intimate material about women and relationships in the book?

A.

I felt this book had to be honest, and it was a way of exorcising a few demons. I felt that it had to be an honest book or it wouldn’t have made sense, you know? This has been my journey. And why are you the way you are? Well, if you read this, then you start to see it didn’t happen over night. It was a long process. And I think that is a very healthy thing, once you understand. I quit being a fashion photographer because I wanted to give something back.

I felt bad about some things I had done in the past. Why would I go off to these nasty places and risk my life? It was like a debt. I have used the

analogy of Westerns. Westerns are always about revenge and redemption. This book is about, in a small way, a quiet revenge. And in a small way, trying to achieve some form of redemption. My revenge is to say, “I survived.” The greatest form of revenge is to still be standing.

So many people, on so many different occasions, wanted to write me off. And so many times they were wrong. So many times people thought, “He is just a bum; he is a dope dealer.” Everybody has someone decent inside of them. Once you acknowledge what that is — and you achieve that — you are going to be a better person.

Q.

How long have you been a photographer?

A.

Since 1971.

Q.

Almost 40 years?

A.

Almost 40 years. Yeah. I wanted to be a musician. I wanted to be Jimi Hendrix, but when I heard Jimi Hendrix, I realized I could never touch him. I wanted to be a painter, but Matisse and all those guys were ahead of me. And I wanted to be a writer, but you know, Richard Wright and all those guys.

And I looked around and all there was was Gordon Parks and Roy DeCarava. I could compete, and I knew I could bring something. It’s like Miles Davis. He was a drummer. But when he picked up a trumpet, he realized that he had found his instrument. When I picked up a camera, it was like one of those movies.