In the centre of Athens, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos has revealed an unconventional gallery display showcasing his private photography collection. Housed within a impressive white-pillared structure reminiscent of an ancient temple, the exhibition provides viewers a markedly absurdist perspective on Greece, documented through the director’s lens over recent years. The exhibition features an eclectic array of images – from discarded washing machines and roadside memorials to intimate portraits of actors including Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe – each infused with the darkly comedic sensibility that characterises his cinematic work. Developed alongside his darkroom assistant Emma Stone, these photographs represent a shift away from Lanthimos’s previous image-making, which remained tethered to his film projects. Instead, this latest collection stands as a singular artistic statement, capturing the peculiar and poignant moments that comprise everyday Greek life.
From Movie Production Sets to Personal Vision
Lanthimos’s connection to photography has evolved considerably over the years. Initially, his images remained intrinsically linked to his film productions, functioning as supplementary documentation of his cinematic worlds. During the making of Poor Things, he captured lavish portraits of the film’s stars whilst simultaneously exposing the technical apparatus usually concealed from view – the lighting rigs, props and scaffolding that constitute a film set’s concealed framework. This two-pronged strategy provided viewers with a rare glimpse behind the curtain, illuminating the filmmaking process whilst preserving aesthetic coherence with his artistic vision.
The transition into distinctly personal photography became ever evident with his following projects. For Kinds of Kindness, Lanthimos produced work that departed markedly from the film’s visual language, rather finding influence from American photographers such as Lewis Baltz and Henry Wessel Jr. His subjects turned more abstract – Willem Dafoe shown only as the back of his head, Emma Stone rendered only as a shadow. This calculated obscurity signals a essential transformation in his practice, one where the photograph stands alone, liberated from storytelling requirement or marketing function, conveying Lanthimos’s distinctive artistic sensibility.
- Poor Things portraits showcased film set infrastructure and technical apparatus
- Kinds of Kindness imagery took inspiration from American photographic traditions
- Subjects increasingly abstracted through cropping and unconventional framing techniques
- New work stands independently from film narratives and commercial pressures
The Dark room as Sanctuary
A Contemplative Retreat
For Lanthimos, the darkroom represents far more than a technical necessity – it functions as a contemplative refuge from the frenetic demands of filmmaking. In an field marked by constant collaboration, endless decision-making and relentless schedules, the darkroom provides solitude and control. Here, in the dim red light amongst chemical baths and enlargers, Lanthimos can withdraw into pure creation, manipulating light and shadow with deliberate precision. The work itself turns into meditative, a counterpoint to the creative disorder of filmmaking where dozens of voices vie for prominence and sway.
This sanctuary has taken on special importance through his partnership with Emma Stone, who has become his photographic assistant. Their work within this private environment reflects a shared understanding of the photographic craft – one founded on careful practice, creative exploration and reciprocal regard. The darkroom serves as a space where imaginative exchange unfolds quietly, removed from the demands of studio schedules and commercial expectations. It is here that Lanthimos’s most intimate artistic ideas come into being, transformed from transient instants captured on film into tangible artistic statements that expose his unique viewpoint on the world around him.
The darkroom’s separation also enables Lanthimos to examine photography without the limitations that commonly shape his film work. Freed from storytelling demands, budget considerations and studio control, he can conduct exclusively visual inquiries – investigating how a woman’s uncovered leg might express emotion more successfully than a face, or how the nape area can function as a arresting visual component. This emancipation permits true creative experimentation, where failed experiments incur no commercial penalty and non-traditional approaches are embraced rather than challenged. The darkroom thus becomes essential to his artistic development, a space where photography operates as self-directed creative endeavour rather than ancillary film record.
Bodies, Bruises and Fragmented Accounts
Lanthimos’s imagery approach prioritises the fragmented body over the traditional portraiture. Arms, legs and torsos serve as main elements, their emotional range often outweighing that of a face. A woman’s bare leg, for instance, conveys feeling and story through its positioning, musculature and context – a bruise tells stories of weakness, mishap or brutality without requiring explanation. This intentional framing and separation of body parts mirrors the compositional techniques evident in his films, where corporeal substance frequently conveys mental intricacy. By eliminating heads from consideration, Lanthimos forces viewers to engage with the body as unadorned visual information, freed from the interpretive shortcuts offered by face reading.
The bruises, scratches and marks adorning these bodies serve as visual record of lived experience. They point to collision, struggle, and the friction between bodies and their environment – themes that resonate throughout Lanthimos’s wider artistic practice. A scarred arm or discolored skin becomes considerably more authentic than any posed expression, documenting the raw reality of physical existence. This method transforms what might ordinarily be viewed as aesthetic imperfections into compelling compositional elements. The photographer treats bodily damage not as something to conceal or sanitise, but as appropriate subject matter worthy of meticulous documentation and aesthetic consideration.
- Partial bodily sections reveal emotion more effectively than conventional portrait photography
- Bruises and marks function as pictorial documentation of bodily experience
- Fragmentation generates narrative ambiguity and interpretive possibility
Finding Home Via Distance
Lanthimos’s decision to photograph Greece intentionally, after a period of creating work elsewhere, represents a deliberate act of artistic renewal. The director approached his homeland with the detached eye of an outsider, despite having grown up there – a perspective that proves surprisingly productive. By treating everyday scenes and surroundings as subjects worthy of aesthetic scrutiny, he transforms the mundane into the strange. Abandoned washing machines, wayside shrines and weathered architectural details become repositories of absurdist observation. This distance from the familiar allows Lanthimos to see Greece afresh, excavating surprising aesthetic merit and dark humour from ordinary moments that locals might overlook completely.
The exhibition itself, located in a contemporary white temple structure in Athens city centre, reinforces this tension between the ancient and the immediate. Lanthimos’s photographs sit alongside references to classical Greek architecture, yet they document a distinctly contemporary, occasionally dilapidated landscape. Coffins propped against walls, horses with severed heads and cryptic roadside markers feature in his visual narrative. This combination generates productive friction: the grandeur of Greek heritage meets the mundane reality of contemporary existence. The photographs reject sentimentality or nostalgia, instead exploring the comic and tragic dimensions of daily existence in contemporary Greece.
From Basketball Playing Areas to Photographic Lenses
Throughout the display, Lanthimos captures spaces of leisure and community – basketball courts, public squares, recreational areas – as sources of compositional intrigue rather than social documentation. These everyday locations become platforms for unconventional viewing, their structural elements and marks of use altered by his visual selections. The visual practitioner’s concern lies not in capturing community interaction but in drawing out structural details that suggest narrative without resolving it. A basketball court’s painted lines, a bench’s weathered surface, or the shadow cast by a lamppost assume new resonance through careful framing and darkroom manipulation.
A Conscious Halt
What distinguishes Lanthimos’s photographic work is his willingness to linger where others might move quickly on. Each image represents a intentional moment of stillness – a moment where the filmmaker has paused to reflect on composition, light and the peculiar expressiveness of inanimate objects. His interest in fragmented body parts removed from their surroundings – a woman’s bare leg, the back of Willem Dafoe’s head, Emma Stone’s shadow – suggests that meaning doesn’t require the complete picture. These fragmented forms contain their own strange eloquence, communicating emotion and narrative through absence and suggestion rather than explicit representation.
This method encompasses his use of the darkroom, where manipulative processes becomes an manifestation of the artistic vision. Working alongside his darkroom assistant Emma Stone, Lanthimos approaches the darkroom as a creative laboratory rather than merely a reproduction facility. The resulting prints bear the marks of intentional manipulation – tonal adjustment, dodging, and burning that accentuate certain elements whilst obscuring others. This methodology mirrors his filmmaking philosophy: nothing is accidental, everything serves the absurdist logic that governs his aesthetic universe.