Greek Director Yorgos Lanthimos Debuts Photography Exhibition in LA

  • Christopher Enolpe
  • March 29th, 2025
Yorgos Lanthimos debut photography exhibition
The exhibition Yorgos Lanthimos: Photographs is on view at Mack + Webber 939 gallery in Los Angeles and runs from March 29 through May 18. Credit: Raph_PH. CC BY 2.0/Wikimedia Commons/Raph_PH

Oscar-nominated director Yorgos Lanthimos brings his distinctive visual style to his first, fine art photography exhibition, celebrating the Greek filmmaker’s artistic expansion beyond Hollywood’s screens.

The exhibition Yorgos Lanthimos: Photographs is on view at Mack + Webber 939 gallery in Los Angeles and runs from March 29 through May 18. It features works from his two photography books, i shall sing these songs beautifully, created during the filming of Kinds of Kindness in New Orleans and Dear God, the Parthenon is Still Broken, created during the filming of Poor Things in Budapest.

Several of the exhibition’s photos have references to these two films, including photos of their stars both in and out of character, yet they’re more than behind-the-scenes moments of the acclaimed director’s films. While Lanthimos had made it a habit of taking set photos, these images have now inspired a new endeavor for the Greek director.

“Photography is something I’ve been taking all the more seriously the last few years and want to concentrate more on, especially now that I need to take a break from filming, after making three films back to back,” Lanthimos tells W in a long interview. “Releasing a film is a different scale, I guess, from having a photography exhibition. But still, there’s a similar excitement and nervousness about showing people your work for the first time on a large scale, whether that is the big screen of a cinema or a large handprint on a wall.”

While Lanthimos was initially interested in filmmaking, he realized he first had to come to grips with photography as “the whole medium starts with still images.” Over the years, he mastered the art and technical aspects of photography, shooting images on his film sets while never believing they would become “an independent thing.”

“I was just interested in the act of taking the picture -looking at it, the magic afterwards or the disappointment, making mistakes and trying to figure out how you can correct them,” he tells W.

Lanthimos has insisted on photographing on film, which he calls “a joy in its own right” compared to shooting digital, which “doesn’t feel like I’m actually taking the picture.’ There’s a gravity to taking an analog image he added, as well as a depth in the film photograph.

“I like the fact that you can just take a picture of a tree, go home, process it, print it, and hold it in your hands and look at it the same day. You may either be disappointed or amazed or intrigued by what it is; it could lead you to start doing something that is interesting to you,” he explained. “The directness of that? I love that compard to filmmaking.”

After living for a decade in London, Lanthimos has recently moved back to Athens, where he is seeing the place from “a very different perspective.” With his camera on hand, he’s been documenting its landscapes as they newly appear to him -a body of work he says he is still processing. “I’d like to take some time off filmmaking and focus on that,” he said.

Yorgos Lanthimos’ films that have been nominated for Oscars before his photography exhibition

Last year, Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’ film Poor Things had received Oscar nominations in eleven categories. In addition, the filmmaker himself had been nominated for Best Director, putting him in competition with Christopher Nolan and Martin Scorsese.

Three of Yorgos Lanthimos’ films have been nominated for Oscars before, and the director has won and been nominated for various other industry awards, too.

His film The Favourite received two Oscar nominations in 2019, one for the Best Motion Picture of the Year category and the other for the Best Director category, while the Greek director’s movie The Lobster was nominated for best original screenplay in 2017.

Yorgos Lanthimos also received a nomination for Best Director for The Favourite at the Boston Society of Film Critics Awards in 2018.

His work has also triumphed at the Baftas, with The Favourite taking home the outstanding British film of the year award in 2019. Furthermore, it was nominated for Baftas under the categories of Best Film and the David Lean award for Best Direction.

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