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, and forgotten land-locked state in the Caucasus which had the misfortune to be of geopolitical importance. Stanley Greene's photographs in Open Wound are so powerful as to make Chechnya our responsibility. He is unashamed to use guilt, with his painter's eye, to relate the deeds of men in Chechnya to our own conduct.

Stanley Greene was born in New York in 1949. Twenty years later he picked up a camera. By 1994 he had found himself in Chechnya, in the Caucasus, amid the systematic extermination of a people and their country. In Open Wound he has shown the story of the Chechen rebellion through his eyes, necessarily clouded by one manÂ’s love for another. He lives in Paris.