‘I love the immediacy of taking a picture’: Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos turns to photography in debut exhibition
With his first major European photography exhibition on display, film director Yorgos Lanthimos discusses his dark optimism, artistic freedom and how getting behind a different type of lens has granted him a new perspective.
Greek film director Yorgos Lanthimos has been turning out deadpan, surprising and often absurd movies for the past two decades. More recently, an intense stint making three features in as many years has left him desperate for a break (as yet unspecified in length). Rather than going silent, though, Lanthimos is presenting his work in another, quieter medium. Yorgos Lanthimos: Photographs, on show at Onassis Stegi in his home city of Athens, is his first major photography exhibition in Europe.
“My way into both films and photography was very gradual,” he says, ahead of the official opening. Growing up, Lanthimos almost pursued basketball professionally before he started shooting commercials – in the 1990s, the industry was booming in Greece. It might be hard to believe that the same director who made such unsettling films as The Killing of a Sacred Deer is also behind a slew of sleek ads but their hyper-saturated polish is also what enticed him to explore black-and-white photography.
Many of the prints displayed at Onassis Stegi were produced on the sets of Poor Things, Kinds of Kindness and the Oscar-nominated Bugonia, with the later pictures possessing a detached, melancholic air. The most poignant images were taken in Greece, the country with which he has reacquainted himself since moving back during the pandemic. There are boxy buildings nestled on rocky terrain; the scratches of a digger on a boulder; a child nuzzling into a woman’s chest at the end of a long lunch. Sadness and beauty collide but Lanthimos is not one to romanticise or embellish in his answers, as in his pictures.
When you take photographs, is it a relief not to have to create a whole new world but to be receptive to what’s already there?
That’s part of it. Compared with film, you don’t need as many people, resources, financing or a plan. You can just shoot whatever you find interesting. When you put together a film, it stays like that until the end of the world, which is stressful and limiting. A picture can be combined with other pictures and [take on a different meaning]. You can make a book and it has a different narrative; make a show and it has another one.
The pictures in the inner section of this exhibition feel very personal. How important is the public aspect of your work?
When I’m on a film set, I’m taking photos for myself first. It lets me see the place I’m in and the people I’m with in a different way. So those pictures are intimate too. The work that I’ve done in Greece is even more so – because I was away for so long, it feels personal. And then there are portraits of people, most of whom are my friends or people I know. At the same time, a lot of my pictures are of landscape. We all see these things – but here’s how I view them and how I can transform them a little bit.
What camera do you like the most?
I have a bit of a disease: I have hundreds of cameras. I favour medium-format and mostly use my Plaubel Makina 67, Mamiya 7 or Pentax 67. Lately I’ve been liking my Hasselblad as well. Whenever I go somewhere, it’s always a struggle deciding which cameras to take with me. I love the tactile aspect of working with analogue. And I love the immediacy of taking a picture. You can go home, develop it, print it and hold it in your hand. You have made something in a day; I find that beautiful. If the picture is good, it’s even greater.
How much expectation is there from within and outside Greece to see your version of the country?
I’ve been making films outside Greece for so long that I don’t think of myself as ever representing the country. But when I made my early film Kinetta, which was shown in Berlin and Toronto, I was in screenings with expats living in Germany or Canada and they were furious because they expected to see a picturesque version of Greece, what they missed from their home country. But I was like any person who makes a film or takes pictures: sharing thoughts and questions about people, places, situations, stories.
Some of the pictures in this show are bleak but also life-affirming. Are you a pessimist or an optimist?
For some time I was a pessimist. Looking at the world right now, I don’t know why you’d become an optimist. But in a way, the hopelessness that I feel makes me want to do things – if we don’t, then what are we going to do? So I’ve become a strange optimist. I’m dark but optimistic.
Does photography allow you to venture into areas that you don’t necessarily explore with your films?
Freed from narrative, you’re able to explore architecture or landscape in simpler ways, which can be quite profound. It’s simpler in terms of form but it feels like it can contain so much. With less, you can show more.
Will this approach feed back into your film-making?
It already has, in a way, even just by taking pictures on film sets. It’s enabled me to see things differently, in how I’m approaching something or filming a scene. It’s almost like a palate cleanser. I think that these things happen mostly unconsciously. I’m sure that when I make another film it will be part of it in ways that I don’t even realise.
‘Yorgos Lanthimos: Photographs’ is on at Onassis Stegi in Athens until 17 May
