Yorgos Lanthimos Expands His Repertoire With First Photography Exhibition in L.A.

Yorgos Lanthimos’s distinctive visual style and penchant for examining life’s macabre absurdities have long set him apart from his filmmaking peers, garnering him both a die-hard legion of fans and critical acclaim. He’s prolific, too, having made three movies in as many years since 2023’s Emma Stone-starring Poor Things (which earned him a Best Directing Oscar nod and Stone, the Best Actress award). But even as he’s poured himself into building his singular cinematic worlds, he’s been honing another craft: fine art photography as showcased in the very pages of W. Now, the first-ever exhibition of his images celebrates the filmmaker’s artistic expansion.

On view at Mack + Webber 939 gallery in Los Angeles from March 29 through May 18, Yorgos Lanthimos: Photographs draws from his two books published last year: i shall sing these songs beautifully, shot during the filming of Kinds of Kindness in New Orleans, and Dear God, the Parthenon Is Still Broken, created during the production of Poor Things in Budapest.

While several of the exhibit’s images reference those films, including portraits of their stars both in and out of character, they’re not strictly behind-the-scenes moments, but rather a broader exploration of the eerie Lanthimos universe. What began as a common director’s habit of taking set photos has transformed into a full-fledged artistic practice.

“Photography is something I’ve been taking all the more seriously the last few years and want to concentrate more on, especially now that I need to take a break from filming, after making three films back to back,” Lanthimos tells W. “Releasing a film is a different scale, I guess, from having a photography exhibition. But still, there’s a similar excitement and nervousness about showing people your work for the first time on a large scale, whether that is the big screen of a cinema or a large handprint on a wall.”

Though the setting is new, Lanthimos has already proven his knack for photography. In 2023, he and his muse and collaborator, Stone, took to the streets of Lanthimos’s native Athens, where the director captured her in a series of black-and-white portraits inspired by their short film Bleat for W’s Art Issue. (It was not their first magazine editorial shoot together—in 2019, he’d envisioned Stone as an eccentric dog lady for our Directors Issue.)

“A few years ago, Yorgos became interested in film photography,” Stone told W. “He began developing his own prints, and he taught me. We started in a makeshift darkroom in his bathroom, but over the past few years, he’s built a professional darkroom in his studio in Athens. He pretty much learned how to develop film by watching YouTube videos.” That last part might be slightly exaggerated—Lanthimos added that he’d had a “master printer” show him their process for “twenty minutes,” but the point stands: he’s self-taught.

Below, the director goes deeper into his photography practice and his first exhibit:

There’s a beautiful photo of Hunter Schafer here.

The portrait of Hunter is one of my favorite portraits I’ve ever taken. It’s hard to explain why, and that’s the beauty of photography. Of course, it also has to do with her singular presence, but during that 1/60 of a second, or whatever the time of the exposure was, is when sometimes many things can fall into place. Most of the time, they don’t. Hunter has been photographed thousands of times and has an ability to shape shift, but to me this portrait seems to be at the same time very simple and pared down but very strong. I caught her between playing a character and taking a break out of that. So in that space and fraction of time, something special appears.

How does your photography practice differ from your filmmaking?

Taking pictures on set has developed for me over the years. In the beginning, it was more about grabbing some memories or having pictures of a particular moment of the film, a scene, actors in their character, and so on. Photographs that we can use for the promotion of the film that represent the film faithfully. But lately, I’ve had the need for my pictures to be something other than the film. A totally different perspective. Looking not only on set but also around, or even totally outside of it, exploring the places that we find ourselves filming in or the people there.

So the photography becomes a separate thing that hopefully stands independently on its own. I’ve also been taking more pictures totally unrelated to my film sets. Mostly traveling around Greece or in Athens. And I hope to have a body of work comprised of those soon.

What is it about these particular photos that resonates with you?

These images are special because in varying degrees they construct a different narrative to my films. The ones in Poor Things, there’s also the process of developing the negatives with Emma [Stone] every evening, after we finished filming.

The fact that the actors would take a few seconds between setups and stand for me and my large format camera for a portrait. Or how I could get lost behind the huge film sets, avoid the crowd, and take pictures that expose the bones of the unique world that we created for that film. The ones I took while filming Kinds of Kindness are special because of exposing minute details of characters, actors, people, and viewing them from a different perspective. At the same time, we were discovering the landscape of the real world we were filming in, constructing a fictional world for the purposes of our film.