„In the beginning there is this scene, this one moment I have the urge to elevate to greater status. It is the concept of taking something that is intangible and making it eminent.“

Randolph F. Greifenbach

Greifenbach’s photo artwork unifies cinematography with photography. Combining the pictorial conventions of a painting with the narrative lure of cinematography, his photographs quote from storytelling. Employing a wide range of representational techniques, Greifenbach reflects and challenges the recreation of a consisting photography into a different dimension.

Born in 1947 in Washington State into an entrepreneurial family of airplane engineers, Greifenbach finished his engineering degree in Seattle as a correspondence course student. After the death of his father, Greifenbach sold the family’s company interests and moved to Los Angeles.

In California, he began to experience with cinematography in his early works. Greifenbach acquired movie-stills of feature films that had a great impact on him and explored different techniques to visually enhance those photos; hand colorizing black and white still photos as well as re-creating and reshaping a particular scene to his own interpretation, as in his work ‘Giant’.

Greifenbach copies and recombines images, subverting their original status in order to regenerate their signifying meanings, and in doing so, infuses them with a new sense of dynamic contingency. His most significant work of re-creating an already existing image is his ‘Warrior’ series. Originally a thumbnail size photo of a barely recognizable American Indian he found as a bookmark, left by the previous owner in an antiquarian novel book from the 1930s. Making use of digital montage techniques, Greifenbach recreated this fallen apart image to a portrait of a Native American, preserving the emotional presence of the warrior’s impressive physiognomy.

One of Greifenbach’s stringent creative characteristics are the perpetual motion dynamics of his work – as in ‘Stampede’, ‘Giant’, ‘Timesquare’ or the ‘Mojave Fighter’ – compensating for his own physical handicap of being tied to a wheelchair most of his life after a tragic motorcycle accident as a teenager.

Greifenbach never attended art school and considered himself a self-taught artist.

Not until shortly before his death in 2020, did Greifenbach exploit his work commercially and displayed his photo art outside his private gallery. Since 2018 a number of selected photo creations of the Greifenbach art collection are presented as limited print editions.