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In the centre of Athens, a brand new temple has popped up. Walk around the tall white columns surrounding it and you’ll eventually find the entrance to its inner sanctum. It might not be quite as old as the nearby Parthenon but it does hold a unique kind of treasure: the personal photographs of director Yorgos Lanthimos.
Taken over the last few years as he wandered his home country, they offer a glimpse of Greece through the auteur’s absurdist eye. We see a coffin resting against a wall next to a mop, and a couple of horses with their heads chopped off by foregrounded trees. A roadside memorial is shown underneath a sign warning of danger ahead – the wiggly road symbol points directly upwards, as if suggesting the route to the next life for the poor victim. This last image is poignant, strange and funny, eliciting the same awkward clash of emotions you get from watching Lanthimos’s films.
“How you view it depends on your mood,” agrees the director when we meet at the gallery of his Athens exhibition on its opening night. “You’ll see it one day and laugh, then see it another day and be like, ‘What happened here?’ It’s dark, it’s nuanced, it’s why I love that picture.”
Lanthimos is no stranger to photography, but his previous images were connected – albeit loosely – to the films he made. These earlier works all feature in the new show, dotted around the outside of the makeshift temple. During Poor Things he produced lavish portraits of its stars – Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, Jerrod Carmichael – while simultaneously exposing viewers to the lighting rigs, props and scaffolding that usually lurk just outside the movie camera’s shot. For the follow-up, 2024’s Kinds of Kindness, Lanthimos created a body of work that had more in common aesthetically with American photographers – Lewis Baltz and Henry Wessel Jr say – than the film itself. One image features Willem Dafoe, but only the back of his head. Emma Stone appears, but it’s her shadow.
Some images, which appear in his new book Viscin, were taken while filming last year’s Bugonia, although he says the book has “virtually nothing” to do with the film: at the gallery entrance, Lanthimos has paired a photo of a dome-shaped building with one of Stone’s equally dome-like head. Did nobody in the movie business take him aside and say: “For God’s sake, Yorgos, this image of an A-lister’s shin is all well and good, but can you please try pointing the camera at their face?” He laughs: “No, thankfully we had a great on-set photographer to do the promotional side.”
Lanthimos happily admits that he uses his camera not to extend his films’ universes but to escape from their pressures. Stone, who has appeared in all of his movies since 2018’s The Favourite, also caught the bug, joining Lanthimos each night after filming to help process that day’s negatives in the makeshift darkroom in his hotel bathroom. “After all this tension on set all day, it became this thing that calmed and focused us,” he says. “It was meditative.”
I read somewhere that Stone felt guilty after ruining some of the photographs. “She was very sensitive about that,” he smiles. “She said, ‘This is someone else’s picture. I don’t want to ruin it!’ But it was just a scratch. No big deal! She never botched the processing of a negative or anything. I think she was hanging a photo from a wire with a clip and it scratched the edges. I said, ‘You won’t even see it when it’s cropped.’ But she was really stressed about it.”
The thing is, Lanthimos quite likes mistakes. In the show, a minimalist image of a sea and horizon sits with repetitive white marks slicing through the sky. “She didn’t do that!” he makes clear. “I don’t know how that happened. But we actually selected it because of the scratches. It is a really simple and minimal image, and the scratches gave it a sense of texture and tactility.”
Lanthimos’s love of the still image can be seen in a montage from Bugonia, which features all kinds of people – copulating lovers, mourners at gravestones – slumped and lifeless. The whole sequence seems like a homage to iconic images such as Mark Steinmetz’s Carey in Full Sun or William Eggleston’s photo of a zonked-out Marcia Hare, but Lanthimos says that was never intentional: “Originally the idea was to show people with their hearts exploding but I realised it would be a more powerful ending to have things still and silent. I think it just naturally became photographic.”
After a prolific period of moviemaking, Lanthimos is now stepping back from cinema. For how long, he doesn’t know. “I made three films back to back,” he says. “No gap. I overdid it. So it might be a couple of weeks, it might be years. But I won’t make another film until I get the urge again.”
The truth is – perhaps weirdly for an acclaimed, Oscar-nominated director – Lanthimos doesn’t enjoy much of the reality of making movies. The hordes of people on set, the constant decisions to be made, the press junkets, the awards frenzy. None of these suit his personality, which he repeatedly tells me is painfully shy in nature. Even a pursuit as solitary as photography can be made difficult by what he calls “the shyness issue” – he finds himself unable to approach strangers and ask if he can photograph them. “I’m hoping I can do that in future, maybe with the help of other people,” he says. There’s something quite sweet about this fearless director – whose films tackle incest, self-mutilation and child sacrifice – finding it tough to go up to someone and say: “Mind if I take your picture?”
People don’t feature too heavily in his series of Greece pictures, which he has called No Word for Blue. When they do, it’s often from behind, or at a distance. Limbs with bodies out of shot are a speciality. A photograph of a woman’s bruised leg appears, which feels in keeping with the way his films fetishise body parts – the rubbing, licking and kissing of them. What’s his fascination?
“I don’t know how to answer that,” he smiles, before giving it a good go. “I think parts of the body are very expressive, especially with bruises or birthmarks or acne or whatever. They can be expressive in a different way to a face. I guess it goes back to telling stories. If you only show a part of something and not the whole thing, it urges you to imagine the rest.”
Igniting the viewer’s imagination is key. I mention an image of a couple standing at the sea’s edge, the male with his head bowed. I couldn’t help project on to it a tale of grief, perhaps a pilgrimage to a site where someone close, perhaps even a child, had drowned at sea. Actually, says Lanthimos, it’s simply a shot of his wife, the actor Ariane Labed, and a friend of theirs, preparing to dip their toes in the cold water. But he welcomes such interpretations. It’s why he loves photography.
I wonder if he has always had this strange, dark and funny way of viewing the world. After all, at one point he was primed for a career as a professional basketball player, following in the footsteps of his father, who played for Pagrati and the Greek national team. I try to imagine Lanthimos at 17, in the locker room with his teammates, his mind overflowing with the twisted and the taboo.
Did he feel like an outsider? “I guess that’s why I quit basketball,” he laughs. “But actually it’s more that I’m reserved and timid – in any situation. I wasn’t doing sport and thinking, ‘Actually, I’m an artist.’ I think I’d feel the same way in any discipline.”
At the age of 19, shortly after quitting the sport, Lanthimos picked up a camera – shooting his peers while at film school in Athens. These days he owns hundreds (film ones, that is – he has no time for digital). “It’s an issue when I have to go somewhere,” he says. “I try to take no more than two at a time.”
Lanthimos started out making adverts, before creating his own films in Greece such as the impeccably strange Dogtooth in 2009. They were celebrated as key parts of the country’s “weird wave” (a term he dislikes). But after the financial crash caused funding to dry up, Lanthimos knew he would need to move away in order to continue making movies. His relocation to London clearly bore fruit, but also made him realise how much he missed his home country.
“When you grow up somewhere, you think you’re in the worst place in the world and everywhere else is better,” he says. “But with the distance, I started looking at all the things in Greece I thought were ugly and horrible – and now saw them as unique. I saw the contradictions in them and how that can be beautiful in a certain way.”
Brexit, which made “everything more complicated for no reason at all”, was the impetus for moving back. And so this is how Lanthimos plans to spend his life for the foreseeable, slowing the frantic pace, reacquainting himself with his homeland and making photographic works of an increasingly intimate and personal nature. Lanthimos might be struggling with the shyness issue, but the gates to his temple are open, and we’re all invited to step inside.
Yorgos Lanthimos: Photographs is at Onassis Stegi, Athens, until 17 May. Viscin is on pre-order via Mack
