The Western Front

The Western Front is Stanley Greene's record of the San Francisco punk scene he lived inside as a young photographer in the 1970s, black-and-white pictures taken from within a music culture rather than at its edge.

Greene moved to San Francisco in 1975 and began photographing the bands, clubs and roommates around him, including the Mutants, the Dead Kennedys and other figures tied to the San Francisco Art Institute, shooting almost nightly with a Leica. The negatives and contact sheets sat unprinted for decades until designer Teun van der Heijden, who had worked on Greene's book Black Passport, rediscovered them. André Frère Éditions published the resulting 176-page hardcover in 2013, pairing English and French text with 110 duotone photographs, to mark the 25th anniversary of Visa pour l'Image.

Born in Brooklyn in 1949, Greene spent most of his career as a war photographer, covering Chechnya, and won the W. Eugene Smith Prize and five World Press Photo awards before co-founding the Noor agency. The Western Front is an outlier in that body of work, a return to the young, undocumented photographs he made before conflict photography became his subject.