“Arms and legs are very expressive, especially with bruises”: the absurdist photography of Yorgos Lanthimos | Photography

IIn the center of Athens, a completely new temple appeared. Walk around the tall white columns surrounding it and you will eventually find the entrance to its inner sanctuary. It may not be quite as old as the nearby Parthenon, but it contains a unique kind of treasure: self-portraits by director Yorgos Lanthimos.

Taken over the past few years as he wandered his homeland, it offers a glimpse of Greece through the author’s absurdist eye. We see a coffin leaning against a wall next to a mop, and a couple of headless horses due to the trees in the foreground. A roadside memorial appears below a sign warning of danger ahead – the symbol of the winding road pointing straight up, as if to suggest the path to the poor victim’s next life. This last image is poignant, strange, and funny, evoking the same strange clash of emotions you get from watching Lanthimos’ films.

“The way you look at it depends on your mood,” agrees the director when we meet in the gallery of his exhibition in Athens on its opening night. “You’ll see it one day and laugh, and then you’ll see it another day and say, ‘What happened here?’ It’s dark, it’s subtle, and that’s why I love that image.

Lanthimos is no stranger to photography, but his previous images have been linked, albeit loosely, to the films he has made. All of these previous works appear in the new display, spread around the exterior of the temporary temple. Throughout Poor Things he produced lavish portraits of his stars — Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo, and Jerrod Carmichael — while simultaneously exposing viewers to the lighting rigs, props, and scaffolding that typically lurk outside a movie camera shot. For the follow-up, 2024’s Kinds of Kindness, Lanthimos has created a body of work that has more in common aesthetically with American photographers — say Louis Baltz and Henry Wessel Jr. — than with film itself. One photo shows Willem Dafoe, but only the back of his head. Emma Stone appears, but it’s her shadow.

Some of the photos, which appear in his new book Viscin, were taken during the filming of Bugonia last year, although he says the book has “practically nothing to do” with the film: At the gallery’s entrance, Lanthimos paired an image of a dome-shaped building with Stone’s equally dome-like head. Didn’t someone in the film industry take him aside and say, “For God’s sake, Yorgos, that photo of a celebrity’s leg is pretty good, but could you please try pointing the camera at their face?” “No, luckily we had a great photographer to do the promotional side,” he laughs.

Lanthimos happily admits that he uses his camera not to expand the worlds of his films but to escape their pressures. Stone, who has appeared in all of his films 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 that stress we had all day, this became the thing that calmed us down and focused us,” he says. “It was meditative.”

I read somewhere that Stone felt guilty after he destroyed some photos. “She was very sensitive about it,” 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! Never messed up processing negativity or anything. I think she was hanging a picture on a wire with a clip and the edges were scratched. “You won’t even see it when it’s cut,” I said. But she was really nervous about this.

The thing is, Lanthimos absolutely loves mistakes. In the view, there is a simplified image of the sea and horizon with recurring white marks crossing the sky. “She didn’t do that!” It is clear. “I don’t know how it happened. But we actually chose this photo because of the scratches. It’s a really simple, simple photo, and the scratches gave it a sense of texture and texture.”

Lanthimos’s love of the still image can be seen in a montage of Pogonia, which shows all kinds of people – lovers of sexual intercourse, mourners at tombstones – decrepit and lifeless. The whole scene seems like an homage to iconic images like Mark Steinmetz’s Carrie in Full Sun or William Eggleston’s photo of Marcia Hair in splits, but Lanthimos says that was never intentional: “Originally the idea was to show people with their hearts exploding, but I realized it would be a more powerful ending to have things stay still and silent. I think it became naturally photographic.”

After a prolific period of filmmaking, Lanthimos is now stepping back from cinema. For how long, he doesn’t know. “I made three films in a row,” he says. “There’s no gap. I’ve overdone it. So it might take a few weeks, maybe years. But I won’t do another movie until I get the urge again.”

The truth is—perhaps strangely for an acclaimed, Oscar-nominated director—that Lanthimos doesn’t enjoy much of the reality of filmmaking. The hordes of people on set, the constant decisions to make, the press trips, and the awards madness. None of this suits his personality, which he repeatedly tells me is painfully shy by nature. Even a solitary practice like photography can become difficult due to what he calls a “shyness issue” – he finds himself unable to approach strangers and ask if he can photograph them. “I hope I can do this in the future, perhaps with the help of other people,” he says. There’s something so beautiful about this brave director — whose films deal with incest, self-mutilation and child sacrifice — that he finds it difficult to walk up to someone and say, “Do you mind if I take your picture?”

People do not feature much in his series of photographs of Greece, which he called No Word for Blue. When they do this, it is often from behind, or from a distance. Outside of photography, parties with bodies are a specialty. It shows an image of a woman’s bruised leg, which seems consistent with the way his films dominate body parts—rubbing, licking, kissing. What is his magic?

“I don’t know how to answer that,” he smiled before giving it a good try. “I think body parts are very expressive, especially with bruises or birthmarks or acne or whatever. They can be expressive in a different way than the face. I think it comes down to storytelling. If you only show part of something and not the whole thing, it encourages you to imagine the rest.”

Igniting the viewer’s imagination is key. I remember a picture of a couple standing at the edge of the sea, the male with his head bowed. I could only offer her a grief story, perhaps a pilgrimage to a site where someone close, perhaps even a child, had drowned at sea. In fact, Lanthimos says, it’s just a shot of his wife, actor Ariane Lapid, and a friend of theirs, preparing to dip their toes in the cold water. But he welcomes such explanations. That’s why he loves photography.

I wonder if he’s always had this weird, dark, funny way of seeing the world. After all, at some point, he was groomed for a career as a professional basketball player, following in the footsteps of his father, who played for Bagrati and the Greek national team. I try to imagine Lanthimos as a 17-year-old, in the dressing room with his teammates, his mind awash with the twisted and forbidden.

Did he feel like a stranger? “I think that’s why I retired from basketball,” he laughs. “But in reality, I’m reserved and shy – in any situation. I wasn’t exercising and thinking, ‘Actually, I’m an artist.’ I think I would feel the same way in any major.”

At the age of 19, shortly after leaving the sport, Lanthimos picked up a camera to photograph his peers while at film school in Athens. These days, he owns hundreds (i.e. films, no time for digital). “It’s a problem when I have to go somewhere,” he says. “I try not to have more than two at a time.”

Lanthimos started out making advertisements, before making his own films in Greece such as the very strange Dogtooth in 2009. They have been celebrated as key parts of the country’s “weird wave” (a term he dislikes). But after the financial collapse caused funding to dry up, Lanthimos knew he would need to step away in order to continue making films. His move to London clearly paid off, but it also made him realize how much he missed his home country.

“When you grow up somewhere, you think you’re in the worst place in the world and that everywhere else is better,” he says. “But with the distance, I started to look at all the things in Greece that I thought were ugly and horrible – and now I see them as unique. I saw the contradictions in them and how they could be beautiful in a certain way.”

Brexit, which made “everything more complicated for no reason at all,” was the impetus for the return. And this is how Lanthimos plans to spend his life for the foreseeable future, slowing down the frenetic pace, reacquainting himself with his homeland and making photographic works of an increasingly intimate and personal nature. Lanthimos may have a shyness problem, but the doors of his temple are open, and we are all invited to enter.

Yorgos Lanthimos: Photographs is at Onassis Stegi, Athens, until May 17. Viscin is available for pre-order through Mack