There is nothing contingent in this continuous world of empty communal spaces, no shadow of human presence in the corridors, stairs and doorways, to detract from the fullness of space. The meticulous attention to composition denies all attempts to situate the scene in any wider context, to show how the part relates to the whole, and ensures that each image appears entirely self-sufficient, a taut and contained world of metaphysical stillness and silence.

The world beyond is present only through its absence, as it is dissolved in a light that appears less an exterior emanation than the effect of an interior logic. The subdued, almost monochromatic colour of the interior, gives the light a tangible quality, as though it possessed substance and were as constitutive of physical space as it is to the formation of the photographic image itself. But despite the self-sufficiency of each image, there is nothing hermetic, claustrophobic or solipsistic about these images. The succession of halls, corridors, doorways and stairs are spaces of passage without predetermined destinations. The contours and boundaries of the physical space they seek to contain are further dissolved in the play of reflected light, its promise of constructed certainty compromised by the coexistence of a measureless space.

This interior movement towards a non-locatable space is mirrored in Lambri's use of light to obliterate all incidental detail, to pare the image down to its essential, so as to create an idea of space, much in the same way that Le Corbusier would elaborate the photographs of his own buildings in L'Esprit Nouveau to reflect his idea of architecture, rather than the actual buildings themselves. In a similar way, Lambri's "Electric City" series derive their name from the city in Lithuania called Electriade, although they were not shot there, since the idea of the city was more important than the physical buildings themselves. The tension between the idea and its manifestation appears inevitable, given that we live in one world where we can see only fragments while we think in another world according to the knowledge that we can obtain about the whole world we can never see.

Though initially Lambri's world may appear to be one of eternal and immutable forms, a terrestrial image of Plato's realm of truth frozen in the certitude of an abstract geometry, it is subject to change. The idea of space Lambri creates is personal rather than idealised, experienced rather than merely viewed. The camera is always at eye-level. It is one of the paradoxes of photography, that it is less a record of an objective, exterior view, than an attempt to capture a feeling which the image will later help the memory unlock. Photography becomes an attempt to record the unseen.
The curious sense of doubling that is to be found everywhere in Lambri's work, from the formal concern for symmetry to images of the same space viewed from slightly different angles, all suggest a certain degree of self-reflexiveness that pushes the documentary image towards a psychological one. This is most evident in her video, Untitled (1999), in which the viewer's experience of the same four shots recombined over time is constantly subject to change. The fixed image itself becomes a site of transition, but one in which the traditional dialectic of division between outside and inside no longer operates. It is as if Lambri has insinuated herself into the house of modernism, that predominantly rational and masculine construct in which, one suspects, she is made most conscious of her own presence, and whose very consciousness reintegrates the space into a personal context, leaving its claim to autonomy an unrealised dream. It is this ceaseless movement between the self and other, inside and outside, seen and the unseen, intimacy and emptiness, document and autobiography, precision and emotion, without ever denying the potency of the other, that gives Lambri's work its peculiar tension, and makes her images simultaneously so unknowable and yet so familiar.
Simon Groom

"Le plan procède du dedans au dehors; l'extérieur est le resultat d'un intérieur"
Le Corbusier