When the Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos moved back to Athens from London in 2021, one of the first things he did was adopt a dog named Vyronas. A solemn portrait of this gentle, almost bear-size rescue animal, with mournful eyes and a scar across his muzzle, is now the poster image for a new photography exhibition in which the director has turned his lens on his native Greece.
A characteristically deadpan view of the filmmaker’s homeland, the show ranges from the sublime to the absurd in moody black-and-white prints: the remote fishing village where his grandmother grew up on the island of Ikaria; the rugged peak of Exomvourgo mountain captured from different angles (including next to a towering trash heap); a coffin propped next to a mop in the corner of an undertaker’s office.
The exhibition, “Yorgos Lanthimos: Photography,” opens Saturday at the Onassis Stegi, a major Athens art venue. On display alongside the shots from his homecoming series, most of which Lanthimos printed in his own darkroom, will be photographs taken on the sets of his three most recent movies: “Poor Things,” “Kinds of Kindness” and “Bugonia,” which is up for best picture at the Academy Awards this month.
When Lanthimos moved to Britain in 2011, he was a promising art-house talent buoyed by the success of “Dogtooth,” an absurdist black comedy that won the Un Certain Regard sidebar at the Cannes Film Festival. He returned to his native Athens a decade later as one of cinema’s leading auteur filmmakers.
“There’s this feeling in Greece that everything abroad is better,” he said in a recent interview at his central Athens studio, with Vyronas sitting adoringly at his side. “I needed to get some distance from where I grew up and see it in a different way,” he said, “to love it for what it is, and find it beautiful because of what it is. ”
A self-described “camera geek” with a vast collection of vintage models, Lanthimos has complemented filmmaking with photography throughout his career — which now spans nine feature films.
It was while studying at the Stavrakos film school in Athens that he first became interested in the medium. There, he also encountered the work of Diane Arbus, Robert Frank and Joel-Peter Witkin: great 20th-century photographers who sparked an interest in the emotional gravity of black-and-white portraiture.
“At film school, you have to learn about photography, because it’s the first stage of understanding how moving images work,” he said. “I would go out with my camera and just snap pictures of friends and other silly stuff.”
But Lanthimos didn’t stick around in film school for long. He began pursuing paid work alongside his studies and dropped out in his sophomore year to focus on directing commercials and theater. Early music video collaborations with some of Greece’s biggest pop acts cemented his position as one of the country’s top creative talents.
Lanthimos carved a reputation for sleek, sexually charged videos that captured the hedonism of early aughts Greece — which was enjoying a significant economic uptick after adopting the euro as its currency. By the time he was in his late 20s, he had scored an invitation to join the team designing the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2004 Athens Olympics.
He turned eventually to feature films, but just as he was establishing a name, Greece’s 2009 financial crisis struck. State subsidies for moviemakers shrank drastically and private financing all but evaporated.
Lanthimos managed to make “Alps,” his 2011 follow-up to “Dogtooth,” on a shoestring, and he has since said that funding constraints helped him think more creatively. Ultimately, however, he decided that he couldn’t realize his cinematic ambitions in Greece and moved to London in search of wider horizons.
Now back in Athens, he finds the city changed.
“There are good and bad things,” he said, adding: “You can find things that you couldn’t before, but there’s gentrification everywhere. Locals are being pushed out by prices ascending.”
Although the economy has rebounded significantly since 2009, when Greece’s sovereign debt crisis led to deep austerity measures and a prolonged recession, daily life remains tough for many Greeks. Inflation has left the country facing an affordability crisis, and a leap in foreign investment in the Athens housing market is quickly pushing prices beyond the reach of average residents.
Lanthimos hints gently at a sense of quiet desperation in his new work, setting a glorious past side by side with a difficult present: fake Doric columns covered in peeling plaster, an abandoned breeze-block bunker on a rocky coastline, a field filled with discarded washing machines.
“I’m particularly interested in how landscapes are affected by humans,” Lanthimos said, “and the kind of contradictions that arise when these beautiful places are touched by the human hand — when they become a little bit strange.”
On the sets of his first productions in the early 2000s, he would take along a camera to shoot images that could later be used for promotion. As his budgets got bigger, there were dedicated on-set photographers, and the director’s attention turned to other things.
It wasn’t until working on “Poor Things” in Hungary in 2021 that he decided to begin capturing on-set life again. This time, though, it wouldn’t just be straightforward behind-the-scenes documentation: Lanthimos decided to create a parallel body of work in the film’s same sumptuously surreal style that could stand alone as a creative endeavor.
Some of the resulting dreamy tableaus look like stills from the movie, but others pan out to reveal the mechanics of the set, with its elaborately painted backdrops, vast lighting rigs and towering scaffolding. There are also hazy, soft-focus portraits of the cast in their Victorian-inspired costumes: Emma Stone with blood smeared across her cheek, Willem Dafoe reclining on a chaise longue and Ramy Youssef gazing wistfully out a window.
“When we were changing a setup, I would shout ‘Portrait time!’” Lanthimos recalled.
After long days on set, Stone — who won the best actress Oscar for her portrayal of the film’s protagonist, Bella Baxter — would help Lanthimos develop the images. “I couldn’t find a good lab for the pictures in Budapest, so I thought: Why don’t we just process the negatives ourselves? We built a little dark room in my hotel bathroom,” he said. “I’d go there after the shoot, and Emma would help me process the film and top up the chemicals.”
Those photographs were compiled into a book called “Dear God the Parthenon Is Still Broken” produced by Void, the Athens-based publisher. Lanthimos has since teamed up with the publisher Michael Mack to produce “I Shall Sing These Songs Beautifully,” a book of shots taken in and around New Orleans while filming “Kinds of Kindness.”
They also worked together on “Viscin,” a collection of pictures taken on the set of “Bugonia” which will be published to coincide with the opening of Onassis Stegi show — which Mack has also curated.
“The show is a deep dive into the last few years of his life,” Mack in an interview in London, where his publishing house is based. “This is everything he’s been seeing away from the movie camera.”
Mack’s layout for the show features a room-within-a-room structure based loosely on the design of a Greek temple. Around the exterior walls, images are arranged in clusters for the movies they relate to, and the interior space features photographs of Greece.
“It’s an extraordinary series of images, some of which are quite discomforting,” Mack said. “He’s been working on these in a very solitary manner, just walking around the Aegean Islands and Athens.”
That solo approach offered a much-needed counterweight to the scale and intensity of his recent filmmaking, Lanthimos said. “It’s more direct and unfiltered,” he added. “You don’t need that many people. You don’t need that much structure and money. You can do it whenever you want.”
Photography, with its quiet rituals and self-contained process, has offered some meditative calm amid the creative whirlwind of the past few years. “I’ve made three films back to back,” Lanthimos said. “So I’d like to take a break from making films. I want to focus on photography a little bit — for now, at least.”
Yorgos Lanthimos: Photographs Saturday through May 17 at the Onassis Stegi in Athens; onassis.org.
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