Theatres of Play (#3)

exuberant, cooperative and vulnerable, the photographs are shot through with a distant sympathy, a carefully measured compassion. But deft portraiture gives way to a series of complex concerns, such as the dynamic of the group and the individual and the growing ambiguity of cultural identity in our contemporary landscape. The idea of borderlines appears everywhere in Greiner’s work, in both literal and elegantly metaphorical ways.

Often, she locates a boundary within the landscape of place; in American Army Villages in Germany (2002), she photographed the physical border between American and German territories. Through this brilliantly literal gesture she invokes the troubled history of the American presence in post-war Germany, registered in military, economic and cultural terms.

What is clear from all of Greiner’s work is the degree to which she understands the profound power of place, its capacity to transcend the prosaic and evoke complex metaphors of history, memory and nostalgia. Greiner regularly exploits the power of places to create images of uninhabited landscapes and interiors that nonetheless generate a multitude of narratives.

This quality of invocation is shown to impressive effect in what is perhaps Greiner’s best-known work to date, a series of photographs of schoolrooms significantly titled Disciplined Spaces – Aspects of Three German Schools (2002). These images reference a universal template of education, childhood and adolescence. At the same time, they underscore the ideologies of discipline that underline even the most liberal of educations.

The series moves with startling rapidity between modern rooms decorated in bright primary colours to shadowy corners denoting menacingly antiquated notions of authority; the common factor running between these two extremes is the powerful demonstration of ideology imposing itself on architectural space.
Above all, perhaps, these abandoned hallways and classrooms register as haunted spaces.

Weinheim Longhorns (2004)

They function hand in hand with Greiner’s night-time photographs of abandoned playgrounds. In this sense, Greiner clearly seems to be working not simply with ideas of discipline and authority, history and influence, but also with the profoundly personal experience of childhood, nostalgia and loss. Throughout her work she infuses this complex nexus of contradictions and complications into her images, expanding both the temporal and narrative dimensions of her photography.