Stanley Greene to co-produce Lagos photo festival

Written by Yejide Gbenga-Ogundare Sunday, 08 July 2012

FIVE times ‘World Press Photo’ award winner, Stanley Greene will be a co – producer of this year’s edition of Lagos Photo festival billed to hold in October with the theme, “Seven Days in the Life of Lagos” which will feature 21 local and international photographers. He will also direct the festival alongside Azu Nwagbogu and Caline Chagoury.

  

According to the organizers, the 2012 edition of the Lagos Photo festival, which is the third one, aims to capture the essence of the city of Lagos and explore what makes it unique as a city and portray it as the business and creative hub of Nigeria that it really is.

The festival opens with an indoor exhibition and grand opening ceremony on October 13 at the Eko Hotel and Suites followed by outdoor exhibitions at venues like Falomo roundabout, Muri Okunola Park, University of Lagos and the Oworonshoki – Alapere median.

Through numerous collaborations, the festival aims to continue to provide a platform for the development of photographic talent through mentoring, workshops and seminars. To maintain the vision of this edition, the renowned expertise of Stanley Greene comes into play considering his reputation for presenting world’s stories in the most visually stunning style combined with the philosophy of using photography to bear witness to the eternal struggle for social justice and human rights.

The images from this year’s festival will be used to publish a book titled, ‘Lagos: Entropy Unchecked’. The organizers also announced the third annual Etisalat Amateur Photography competition with the theme, ‘The Essence of Attitude’ with a cash prize of N100, 000 and a galaxy tab for the winner, N75, 000, a black berry and a modem for the second prize and N50, 000 and a modem for the third prize winner.

  

Brief about Stanley Greene: (born 1949, in Brooklyn, New York) is a photojournalist.

Greene was born to middle class parents in Brooklyn. Both his parents were actors. His father, who was born in Harlem, was a union organizer, one of the first African Americans elected as an officer in the Screen Actors Guild, and belonged to the Harlem Renaissance movement. Greene's father was blacklisted as a Communist in the 1950s and forced to take uncredited parts in movies. Greene's parents gave him his first camera when he was eleven years old.

Greene began his art career as a painter, but started taking photos as a means of cataloging material for his paintings. In 1971, when Greene was a member of the anti-war movement and the Black Panthers, his friend, photographer W. Eugene Smith offered him space in his studio and encouraged him to study photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York and the San Francisco Art Institute.

Greene held various jobs as a photographer, including taking pictures of rock bands and working at Newsday. In 1986, he shot fashion in Paris. He called himself a "dilettante, sitting in cafes, taking pictures of girls and doing heroin". After a friend died of AIDS, Greene kicked his drug habit and began to seriously pursue a photography career. He began photojournalism in 1989, when his image ("Kisses to All, Berlin Wall") of a tutu-clad girl with a champagne bottle became a symbol of the fall of the Berlin Wall. While working for the Paris-based photo agency Agence Vu in October 1993, Greene was trapped and almost killed in the White House in Moscow during a coup attempt against President Boris Yeltsin. 

He has covered the war-torn countries Azerbaijan, Georgia, Iraq, Somalia, Croatia, Kashmir, and Lebanon. He has taken pictures of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and the US Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Since 1994, Greene is best known for his documentation of the conflict in Chechnya, between rebels and the Russian armed forces, which was compiled in his 2004 book, Open Wound. These photos have drawn attention to the "suffering that has marked the latest surge in Chechnya's centuries-long struggle for independence from Russia".

In 2008, Greene revealed that he had hepatitis C, which he believed he had
contracted from a contaminated razor while working in Chad in 2007. After controlling the disease with medication, he travelled to Afghanistan and shot a story about "the crisis of drug abuse and infectious disease". Greene has lived and worked in Paris since 1986.

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