Director Yorgos Lanthimos did not win an Oscar for his most recent science fiction film, BugoniaBut still images from the collection found their way into his new show at Onassis Stage in Athens.Yorgos Lanthimos: photosthrough May 17. It features 110 new images, as well as three groups of works associated with his films, making it the largest exhibition of the director’s first-rate photographs ever presented in an institutional setting. Designed in the form of a classical Greek temple, an altar-like central space displays the bulk of the display, mostly black-and-white photographs, with pieces associated with the film occupying the outer perimeter.
As a student at the Stavrakos Hellenic Film and Television School in Athens, Lanthimos was inspired by the works of Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, and Joel Peter Witkin. Taking photos on his film sets for publicity purposes eventually became taking photos for their own sake, which he developed in a makeshift darkroom in his hotel room, often with the help of Emma Stone, while on location. “I started out with an artistic interest in photography so that I could, I guess, evolve into filmmaking. But through the whole filmmaking process, having to use photography and take pictures, it also gave me a way to step away from the film while preparing,” Lanthimos told a group of us gathered at the opening.
Selected from images taken over the past five years, the exhibition includes three series of photographs taken on film sets in New Orleans, Atlanta and Henley-on-Thames, as well as soundstages in Budapest. Some are from previously exhibited portfolios, such as Dear God, the Parthenon Is Still Broken, which was assembled during the filming of Bad thingsincluding photos of Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, and Ramy Youssef in costume. I will sing these songs beautifully Parallel production Types of charityand Viskin Includes never-before-seen works captured on set Bugonia.
A photo of his dog, Vyronas, adopted upon the director’s 2021 return to Athens, got the star treatment as the poster image for the new show, which includes black-and-white prints shot in the city and on the Greek islands. The focus is on the mundane – an image of a pale figure looking down on the grass at night, a security guard turning back to the camera, facing a brick wall. A woman stands in the stark shadow of a lamppost at an intersection in one photo, while another shows a coffin propped up in an undertaker’s office. The third is a remote fishing village on the island of Ikaria, where Lanthimos’ grandmother grew up.
“What the work shows is how you can stand there, and you can extrapolate the narrative outside the frame,” said curator Michael Mack, noting that the accompanying book is a Leporello foldout that mimics a cinematic sequence. “It is almost as interesting what happens outside the frames and what it generates in the viewer. This is the power of the medium. This exhibition establishes its burgeoning ability to provoke emotional and intellectual leaps of faith outside the frame of a still image.”
While he received six Academy Award nominations, and a Golden Globe and BAFTA nod for his film FavoritesLanthimos’s embrace of photography stems from what the medium offers that his chosen profession does not—creating not with a team but individually and without a specific goal, time or financial constraints. “You don’t need a product, you don’t need to check the budget. So, it gives you some freedom, a lot of freedom,” he said. “An image may be used in a book, or it may be presented in an exhibition or made in different combinations with another story. Each time it takes on a different meaning. Or the tone varies, or the theme changes. If you include more of one type of image with another, suddenly a different theme becomes more prevalent.”
This point of view explains the foundational cinematic concept known as the Kuleshov effect. In 1918, Russian director Lev Kuleshov showed that context determines how the audience interprets a shot. Placing a person with a neutral face next to a bowl of soup led viewers to believe the person was hungry, while placing the same shot next to a photo of a dead child led viewers to believe the person was mourning. By varying the order and context in which his images are presented, Lanthimos practices this cinematic rule to achieve a variety of effects.
“Everything is interesting. Everything can be complex, even the landscape, even the animal’s face,” says Lanthimos, who went along with his idea. unique She is currently developing a film adaptation of Richard Brautigan’s gothic western novel, Monster Hawkline. “I’m interested in so many different things and things. I couldn’t really choose.”
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