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“Yorgos Lanthimos: Photographs” unveils 180 images captured on and off film sets over the past five years, offering visitors an alternative, frozen view of his cinematic practice. The exhibition space was conceived as a classical Greek temple, though it retains a white cube interior. The first three sections present Lanthimos’s desaturated color and black-and-white images taken on set, with a fourth and final section revealing seventy new black-and-white portraits and landscapes taken on the outskirts of Athens and on trips to the Greek islands.

Lanthimos’s command of moving images has led him to craft scintillating, anachronistic cinema, from pseudo-fascist domestic thriller Kynodontas (2009) to the absurd, baroque horror of Poor Things (2023), in which Emma Stone’s Bella Baxter grapples with having an infant’s mind trapped in an adult woman’s body. Yet here, there are moments marked by an even greater sense of voyeuristic detachment and negative space that can only be fully experienced when his imagery is stripped of sound and movement. The ominous possibilities of a loose rope dangling down the side of an empty swimming pool, or the surreal image of a piglet staring into a velvet blanket at the foot of a palatial bed, remain unresolved, prompting myriad unanswered questions.

To those well-versed in his filmography, the unmistakable flourish of a satin leg-of-mutton sleeve or Stone’s auburn hair serves as an immediate portal into the more fantastical aspects of his narrative style. Yet overall, the exhibition posits Lanthimos as a kind of sociologist. In his imperfect compositions of emptiness and contemplative portraiture, he reveals a reverence for his homeland and its people that at times leans on the heritage of great 20th-century imagemakers. At a glance, one can detect shades of Pier Paolo Pasolini and the American pictorialist tradition of the Group f/64, all the way through to the social narratives of Jeff Wall and Larry Sultan.

“The ongoing series of black-and-white works made in Greece, away from his filmmaking practice, marks a new departure, a turning inward to a known landscape,” said Michael Mack, the exhibition’s curator and publisher of its accompanying monograph. “Emerging within a long tradition of photography applied to document the man-altered landscape, it also reflects an era of self-reflection and of his advanced progress in developing his own language in photography.”

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“Yorgos Lanthimos: Photographs” remains on view at Onassis Stegi through May 17.

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Dan Thawley is an Australian-born journalist and editor. In 2023, he became artistic director of Matter and Shape, a design salon in Paris.

Yorgos Lanthimos is an internationally renowned, five-time Academy Award-nominated director, producer and screenwriter. His accolades include a BAFTA, a Golden Globe and the Jury Prize at Cannes. He is also an accomplished photographer.