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The World as Seen Through Yorgos Lanthimos’ Lens

An exhibition at Onassis Stegi in Athens showcases a body of photographic work that is as quietly unsettling as anything the filmmaker has put on screen.

Filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos did not win an Oscar for his latest sci-fi piece, Bugonia, but still photos from the set found their way into his new show at Onassis Stegi in Athens, “Yorgos Lanthimos: Photographs,” on through May 17. It features 110 new images, as well as three bodies of work linked to his films, making it the largest exhibition of the A-list director’s photographs ever presented in an institutional context. Designed in the form of a classical Greek temple, a central altar-like space displays the bulk of the show, mostly black-and-white images, with film-related pieces occupying the outer perimeter.

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As a student at the Hellenic Cinema and Television School Stavrakos in Athens, Lanthimos was inspired by the work of Diane Arbus, Robert Frank and Joel-Peter Witkin. Taking pictures on his film sets for publicity purposes eventually became taking photos for their own sake, which he developed in a makeshift darkroom in his hotel room, often with the help of Emma Stone, while on location. “I started with a technical interest in photography in order for me, I thought, to grow into filmmaking. But through the whole process of filmmaking, where I had to use photography, taking pictures, this also gave me a way to move away from the film during preparation,” Lanthimos told a group of us gathered for the opening.

Culled from images shot over the past five years, the show includes three photographic series made on film locations in New Orleans, Atlanta and Henley-on-Thames, as well as soundstages in Budapest. Some are from previously exhibited portfolios, like “Dear God, the Parthenon Is Still Broken,” assembled during the filming of Poor Things, including portraits of Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe and Ramy Youssef in costume. i shall sing these songs beautifully parallels the production of Kinds of Kindness, and viscin includes previously unseen works captured on the set of Bugonia.

A portrait of his dog, Vyronas, adopted upon the filmmaker’s 2021 return to Athens, gets star treatment as the poster image of the new show, which includes black-and-white prints shot in the city and on Greek islands. Focus is on the mundane—an image of a pale figure looking down on a nighttime lawn, and a security guard, back to the camera, facing a cinderblock wall. A woman stands in the stark shadow of a streetlamp post at a traffic intersection in one image, while another shows a coffin propped up in an undertaker’s office. A third is of a remote fishing village on the island of Ikaria, where Lanthimos’ grandmother grew up.

“What the work shows is how you could stand there, and you can extrapolate a narrative beyond the frame,” offered curator Michael Mack, noting that the accompanying book is a leporello fold that mimics a filmic sequence. “It’s almost more interesting what’s happening beyond the frames and what it engenders in the viewer. And that’s the power of the medium. This exhibition establishes his flourishing capacity to elicit emotional and intellectual leaps of faith beyond the frame of a still photograph.”

While he holds six Oscar nominations, a Golden Globe nod and a BAFTA for his film The Favourite, Lanthimos’s embrace of photography stems from what the medium offers that his chosen profession doesn’t—creating not with a team but individually and with no specific goal, time or money constraints. “You don’t need a producer, and you don’t need to be checking the budget. So, this gives you some freedom, a great freedom,” he said. “A picture may be used in a book, it might be presented in an exhibition or make different combinations with another narrative. Each time they acquire a different meaning. Or the tone is different, or the theme changes. If you include more of one type of picture with another type, suddenly a different theme becomes more prevalent.”

This viewpoint demonstrates a foundational cinematic concept known as the Kuleshov Effect. In 1918, Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov showed that context determines how audiences interpret a shot. Placing a neutral-faced person next to a bowl of soup led viewers to think the subject was hungry, while placing the same shot next to an image of a dead child led viewers to think the subject was in mourning. Lanthimos, by altering the order and context in which his photos are viewed, exercises this cinematic rule to achieve a variety of effects.

“Everything is interesting. Everything can be complicated, even a landscape, even an animal face,” says Lanthimos, who in keeping with his sui generis body of work, is currently developing a film adaptation of Richard Brautigan’s Gothic western novel, The Hawkline Monster. “I’m interested in so many different things and objects. I couldn’t really choose.”

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