Yorgos Lanthimos: From Set Photographer to Nonetheless-Maker — Blind Journal

Yorgos Lanthimos has spent the previous few years working at an unrelenting tempo. Poor Things, Kinds of Kindness, Bugonia are three movies launched in fast succession, every gathering its personal momentum. Alongside that motion, nonetheless, one thing quieter has been taking form: a photographic apply that turns away from manufacturing and towards a extra solitary, attentive means of seeing.

Viscin, printed by MACK, is the clearest expression of that shift up to now. The e-book unfolds as a leporello — an accordion of 27 photographs stretching right into a steady sequence. There is an echo of cinema on this construction, however the impact is slower, extra suspended. The photographs don’t construct towards something; they accumulate, drift, maintain.

Lanthimos’s relationship to images is, partially, a return. Early in his profession, he labored as a set photographer on his personal productions, earlier than steadily transferring away from the medium. During lockdown, he got here again to it with a large-format digital camera and, with it, a special sort of consideration. What emerges in Viscin is just not documentation, however distance. A means of stepping simply outdoors the body of the movie itself.

The pictures linger in that house. Figures seem partially obscured, caught mid-gesture or turned away; interiors and landscapes really feel paused, as if ready for one thing that by no means fairly arrives. Though the photographs have been made round Bugonia, they resist any direct relationship to it. In writer Michael Mack’s phrases, that is work that strikes “further and further from the edges of the movie”— photographs formed by “momentary engagement with a place” relatively than narrative. It is feasible, he suggests, to come across the e-book with out the movie in any respect, and maybe extra freely that means.

The sequencing reinforces this sense of quiet detachment. The e-book strikes nearly totally in black and white, establishing a subdued rhythm earlier than color enters abruptly on the finish. It doesn’t resolve the sequence a lot as shift its register — opening briefly onto one thing extra vivid, but additionally extra distant.

Formally, the e-book holds the whole lot in cautious stability. Each picture is scaled to the identical top, no matter orientation, in order that it “sits like a film strip,” as Mack places it, “contained on a consistent ratio,” overriding the same old logic the place the digital camera dictates the web page. The result’s refined however cumulative: a gradual visible line that unfolds throughout the size of the e-book. Fully opened, Viscin turns into much less one thing to flip via than one thing to maneuver alongside.

What emerges throughout the sequence is a shift in emphasis. These will not be photographs formed by efficiency or path, however by encounter — by the act of trying itself. As Michael Mack notes, Yorgos Lanthimos has “an extraordinary capacity as a still-maker.” There are traces of reference — he mentions Henry Wessel — however what comes via most clearly is a lightness of contact, a quietly visionary means of creating pictures. The connection to movie stays, but it surely speaks a special visible language.

This motion towards autonomy displays a broader turning level. Yorgos Lanthimos is stepping again from filmmaking for a interval, focusing as an alternative on a long-term photographic challenge in Greece and the Aegean Islands, working alone, and not using a crew, strolling with a digital camera. As Michael Mack observes, “the quieter life suits him.”

VISCIN (2026) by Yorgos Lanthimos is printed by MACK. The exhibition “Yorgos Lanthimos: Photographs” is on view at Onassis Stegi in Athens from March 7, 2026, to May 17, 2026.