Yorgos Lanthimos Pauses Filmmaking, Debuts 110 Analog Photographs at Onassis

Yorgos Lanthimos has stepped back from making movies "for now, at least" to focus on analog photography, and Athens’s Onassis Stegi is mounting a major presentation that places 110 new works at the center of a program running through May 17. The exhibition assembles more than 180 prints overall, with a central altar-like installation of 110 new images and a perimeter of film-associated frames, presenting the Greek series in its international debut.

Curator Michael Mack frames the project as a decisive shift in medium and method. Mack said, "Yorgos Lanthimos is a singular talent in the use of a camera lens to build narratives, and this exhibition establishes his flourishing capacity to elicit emotional and intellectual leaps of faith beyond the frame of a still photograph." Mack continued that "the ongoing series of black-and-white works made in Greece away from his filmmaking practice marks a new departure, a turning inwards to a known landscape," language used in the show's wall text.

Lanthimos’s practice for the past five years sits firmly in analog processes: he shoots medium and large format film, develops negatives in darkrooms, and favors high-contrast black-and-white prints with occasional jarring pops of color. He has described the medium as liberating, saying, "Taking photos has become an important thing in my life other than filmmaking; it is so much freer," and, "It feels like there are fewer rules tied to conventional narrative." He has also noted the immediacy of printmaking: "You create something and almost immediately it exists. You can take a photograph, print it and hold it in your hands. That satisfaction is very direct."

The Onassis Greek series originates in solitary walks through Athens and nearby islands, recording "shadows across courtyards, fragments of weathered architecture and glimpses of the mundane," and exploring the man-altered landscape where beauty and strangeness collide. Image material in the show includes frames made while shooting Kinds of Kindness in New Orleans and while on set for Poor Things in Hungary, the latter where Lanthimos revived hands-on darkroom work in 2021. One captioned scene shows "a person in a red suit stands facing drawn cream-colored curtains in a softly lit bedroom," another depicts "a person stands on a sidewalk near a street corner, partially shaded by a pole" with palm trees in the distance, and a black-and-white frame presents "a stone circular structure in a walled yard with neatly trimmed, dome-shaped trees and a building in the background, a mountain visible in the distance."

Lanthimos traces the revival to his film-school roots, saying, "In film school you learn that cinema is basically 24 photographs per second… So photography is where it all begins." He has published multiple photo books and showed work in Los Angeles earlier this year, with two recent books collecting images from Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness.

Reports differ on certain biographical and award labels: some coverage calls Lanthimos "Oscar-winning," while other reports describe him as "Oscar-nominated," and Vanity Fair has referred to Poor Things with Oscar-winning language. Exhibition counts, the exact opening date, and award phrasing should be confirmed with Onassis Stegi press materials and Lanthimos’s official records before using honorifics in cataloging or promotion.

The Onassis presentation positions Lanthimos’s analog output as a public turning point: the staged, temple-like arrangement of 110 new works and the surrounding film frames chart a movement from set-adjacent image-making to a quieter, self-directed practice that Lanthimos has described as relieving the stress of filmmaking and offering "a freedom in photography that is very exciting.