I f you’ve seen the films of Yorgos Lanthimos—perhaps “Poor Things” (2023), for which Emma Stone won the Oscar for best actress, or “The Favourite” (2018), for which Olivia Colman did the same—you are familiar with his rich visual vocabulary. The fish-eye-lens shots that signal mental dislocation. The super-wide establishing shots that help the director do his loopy world-building. The soberly framed silly dancing. The textured interior walls that seem to be alive, as damp and undulatory as the inside of a teapot. The suturing, figurative and literal, of things that don’t really go together: flying trams in a Victorian sky; a chicken with the head of a pig.
For all this, says Lanthimos, who is 51 years old and has ten features to his name, “I am a young photographer.” What he means is that, though he has been directing since the 1990s, when he established himself in his native Greece shooting music videos and TV commercials, he had not until recently had the gumption to show his still photography to the public.
Not that Lanthimos wasn’t already snapping away. He owns well over 100 cameras, most of them of the old-fashioned film variety. “I’m a hoarder. I think I’ve bought every kind of medium-format camera that exists,” he says, speaking from his home base in Athens. “I usually get them from eBay or find people who know people that sell them. I’ll read about a camera, think, ‘Oh, I’d like to have this one,’ search for it, and get it. And then use it for a week and probably go back to the other camera I was using.”
“Yorgos Lanthimos: Photographs,” the first exhibition of the filmmaker’s still work, is now on view until June 21 (extended from April) at Webber 939 in downtown Los Angeles. The show features photos taken during the making of Lanthimos’ two most recently released movies, “Poor Things” and last year’s “Kinds of Kindness.” (His next feature, “Bugonia”—his fourth starring Stone—will be out later this year.)
It was the quasi-Victorian world of “Poor Things”—in which Willem Dafoe’s Frankenstein-like mad scientist reanimates the dead body of Stone’s suicidal socialite by implanting in her head the brain of her unborn child—that prompted Lanthimos to break out his camera collection and put it to serious use. “Because it was a period piece, I thought it would be nice if I took some black-and-white portraits in 4 by 5,” he says. For these, he used a large-format Chamonix camera. While shooting the film’s even more fanciful color sequences, in which Stone’s character leaves her native London for adventures in Lisbon, Alexandria, Marseille and Paris, Lanthimos used a medium-format Plaubel Makina, shooting in 6 by 7.
In reality, the entire movie was shot on soundstages in Budapest, its cityscapes the elaborate confections of Lanthimos, the cinematographer Robbie Ryan and the production designers Shona Heath and James Price. “We built our own darkroom in the bathroom,” Lanthimos says. “After every shoot day, I would go back to it. Emma [Stone] helped me process a lot of the negatives. We learned to do both black-and-white and color there, and scanning as well.”
The results proved wondrous. The large-format photos—Stone in profile, a single braid snaking down her left shoulder; the actress Suzy Bemba seated in a wrought iron chair, her hair in tight cornrows, her sleeves enormously pouffed; Margaret Qualley, her expression stricken, mysterious smudges (blood? greasepaint?) on her face; a pig solemnly milling about a bedroom, not yet CGI’d into a chicken-pig—have the haunted quality of 19th-century daguerreotypes.
The color prints are more playful. In one, taken by a Budapest lake, one of the few real locations used in “Poor Things,” Stone sits pensively in full costume, looking like Shakespeare’s Ophelia on the cusp of her plunge into the drink. The spell is broken by the object Stone is sitting on: an electric vehicle used for dolly shots, topped by a grimly utilitarian mover’s blanket, a takeout coffee cup and, in a clamshell container, Stone’s boxed lunch. “That could have been a simple portrait of Emma against the lake,” Lanthimos says. “I just love making the pictures a little dirtier. I love messing with the prettiness of that idyllic kind of space.” In another photo in a similar vein, the actor Jerrod Carmichael leans against the railing of the movie’s gorgeously steampunk steamship in a dandy’s spectator shoes and linens, but above and behind him are the industrial fans and lighting rigs that conspired to make him look cool and windswept in the completed film, as well as the curved LED screen that served as the ship’s “sea” backdrop.
Ryan, who has worked as Lanthimos’ director of photography on his last four films, observes that the sense of play the filmmaker brings to his still photography has helped him in his day job. “I think for Yorgos it’s a remedy for dealing with the pressures of day-to-day filmmaking,” he says. “He is very calm and relaxed and effortlessly mixes the two worlds.”
“Kinds of Kindness” marked a departure from “Poor Things” and “The Favourite,” in that it was filmed in the United States—New Orleans, specifically—and used real locations. Much of the photography from this period in the Webber 939 show is nonetheless recognizably Lanthimos-esque. There’s a night shot of Jesse Plemons in a walking boot, taken from behind (backs of heads being yet another Lanthimos motif) and a graphic close-up of a squishy leather couch cushion, taken with a Mamiya 7, that evokes the viscera that ooze so freely through “Poor Things.”
With open air, natural light and real city blocks available to him in New Orleans, Lanthimos began taking photos unrelated to “Kinds of Kindness,” such as a banana tree rapidly outgrowing its fenced-in lot and the city’s majestic Hibernia Bank Building as seen through a filmy, translucent curtain. “Hopefully,” he says, “I’m building a body of work that I’ll be able to put together at some point that is totally irrelevant to my filmmaking.”
Lanthimos is wary of citing the photographers who most inspire him, as he has spent the better part of his filmmaking career struggling to answer the question, What directors have influenced you the most? “I tried to settle on three who are so different from each other: John Cassavetes, Luis Buñuel and Robert Bresson,” he says. “I do admire them greatly, but at the same time, there are so many others. It’s the same with photography. I’m still learning and discovering, so I’m hooked on different things at different times.”
Michael Mack, whose MACK imprint recently published “i shall sing these songs beautifully,” a collection of the “Kinds of Kindness”-era photos, told Lanthimos his work evokes the spooked, empty industrial parks and office spaces of the American photographer Lewis Baltz. “I didn’t know who Lewis Baltz was,” Lanthimos says, “but now I’ve bought all of his books.” Pressed, he offers a list of other American greats—Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Rosalind Fox Solomon, Mitch Epstein, Sage Sohier and Robert Adams—as current favorites.
Lanthimos finds himself more devoted than ever to still photography. “The exhibition has given me more strength and excitement to go out and focus more on it,” he says. “I’ve made three films back to back with no break, so I’d love to take some time off and just concentrate on making pictures.” To that end, he has installed a professional-grade darkroom in his home.
The move back to Athens happened only recently, after he and his family had lived in London for a decade. The time away has allowed Lanthimos to regard his native city with fresh eyes, through his 100-plus cameras. “When I was really young,” he says, “I was like, ‘Why is everything so ugly? Why are there no beautiful buildings?’ Everything just got abandoned and demolished, which is still a problem today, unfortunately. But now I try to see the beauty in this chaos—all these different elements that make the city what it is. I’m trying to capture it, share it and let everyone figure it out.”
He is too shy, he says, to stop people on the street and ask them if he can take their picture. His human subjects, for now, shall remain the people he works with on his films. Lanthimos has, however, been testing out his instant cameras, a MiNT and a Polaroid, on a living, breathing subject.
“I take a lot of pictures of my dog,” he says. “His name is Vyronas. He’s a rescue, a beautiful mix of a Greek Shepherd with something we don’t know. He’s a big dog, very calm and quiet and traumatized, but very sweet.” Dog photos: It’s comforting to know that even the most transgressive of auteurs cannot resist them.
“Yorgos Lanthimos, Photographs” is on show at Webber 939 through June 21, 2025.
