My non-public ardour: Yórgos Lánthimos exposes his private pictures assortment

Visitors to the Onassis Foundation in Greece now have the chance to find a unique, lesser-known creative aspect of Yórgos Lánthimos.

The internationally acclaimed director and multi-award-winning grasp of transferring photographs is presenting his deep ardour for nonetheless pictures, by means of a serious exhibition, aptly titled ‘Photographs.’

Lánthimos’ love for this medium has developed over the past 5 years, as he freely admits it provides him freedom in relation to filmmaking and the added strain of coping with large studios.

“What I like about photography is mainly the way in which it is differentiated from cinema, even though technically both start from the same point. In film school you learn right away that cinema is essentially 24 pictures a second. So technically you have to go through the process of learning photography,” defined Lánthimos on the inauguration of the exhibition.

“I did not know from the start that I might be so excited about pictures per se. So I additionally began by placing in my thoughts that I needed to be taught it technically and to maneuver on to what I used to be most excited about, which was movie. Slowly, by means of the method of filmmaking, which I had to make use of pictures anyway, I started to adore it increasingly more, as a result of it gave me one other outlet in the course of the making of the movies.

“I also really like the practical connection too. I like cameras very much. I like the darkroom, developing film, printing photos. The immediacy of creating something. That is, you can go for a walk, shoot a roll of film, go home, develop it, print two photos and hold them in your hand and look at them. All of this has a very immediate satisfaction or disappointment when you haven’t done very well. But the satisfaction is very great and immediate compared to other things again,” added Lánthimos.

The exhibition on the Onassis Cultural Centre is developed in 4 sections. The first three revolve across the locations and individuals who star in his movies. These are pictures taken on the sidelines of filming, in metropolis areas and in studios.

The fourth set, offered for the primary time worldwide, is an ongoing collection of private black and white pictures taken in Greece.

In these pictures, collected throughout solitary walks on the outskirts of Athens and on visits to Greek islands, Lánthimos focuses on the on a regular basis and the banal, exploiting the medium’s potential for abstraction and transformation: “I remember that I always liked taking black and white photographs. Even when I started in Greece, working on commercials where everything had to be very clean and very beautiful, I always had a tendency to shoot black and white,” defined Lánthimos.

“I left for about ten years and when I came back, in a way, I had gained a distance from Greece. At that time I think I very consciously chose black and white, not in relation to ugliness, the opposite in relation to a postcard aesthetic that is familiar to us. And because I was very interested in photographing on the islands, on the sea, in places like that. I didn’t want these postcard colors to distract from the subject itself. I wasn’t trying to hide the ugliness. What I wanted was more to not distract from what I was interested in in these particular images.”

Designed within the type of a classical Greek temple, the exhibition creates a central area paying homage to an altar, the place 110 new works by Lánthimos are displayed, whereas the three units of works linked to his movies are offered on the outer perimeter, in order that the viewers strikes from his well-known work to the interior core of his new photographic work.

“I think the most interesting and exciting element of this exhibition is the idea that we have an extraordinary filmmaker. Not many people know that for the last five or six years he has also been using a camera,” mentioned curator of the present Michael Mack.

“Along with making his films, he’s also taking his own photographs. But more importantly, he also creates personal works. There is a relationship between cinema and photography. But what you see is a revolution in his way of thinking about the possibilities of photography, where he enters this private space of creating personal works in relation to his homeland,” added Mack.

Many of the photographs are included in his latest pictures books: “Dear God, the Parthenon Is Still Broken” (2024), from the filming of Poor Things (2023), “i shall sing these songs beautifully” (2024), created in parallel with Kinds of Kindness (2024), and “VISCIN” (2026) with unpublished pictures from the filming of his newest movie, Bugonia (2025).

“It is very clear that his work comes from a particular tradition of photographic engagement with the man-made environment. A history that goes back to the 60s and 70s from the environmental movement, especially in America, where people were looking at the impact of humans on the landscape,” mentioned Mack.

Yorgos Lanthimos: Photographs is on the Onassis Cultural Centre on the Onassis Foundation in Athens till 17 May 2026.