Yorgos Lanthimos, Photographs

MACK and WEBBER are delighted to announce Yorgos Lanthimos: Photographs, the first exhibition of still photography by the visionary filmmaker.

This exhibition presents photographs from Lanthimos’ two recent books: i shall sing these songs beautifully (MACK, 2024), made during the filming of his latest feature Kinds of Kindness (2024), together with works from Dear God, the Parthenon Is Still Broken (Void, 2024), shot during the making of Poor Things (2023).

Lanthimos is celebrated for his ambitious world-building and absurdist explorations of human relationships, which has established him as one of the most distinctive auteurs in contemporary cinema. This debut exhibition offers a new perspective on the artist’s practice and reinforces his position as a unique and singular visionary in contemporary visual culture.

Real set locations of New Orleans and Budapest, and recreated cities and interior constructed sets of London, Lisbon, Alexandria and Paris provide a backdrop for Lanthimos’ stills, rich with unsettling atmospheres and eerie tensions. The bodies of his subjects appear at discrete and haunting intervals with an intense physicality, limbs often splayed, and faces turned away.

In i shall sing these songs beautifully, his cast and film sets are utilised subtly to elaborate an entirely new narrative. The debris of the film set—scaffolding, lighting rigs, and a coffee cup—appear on the periphery of the images in Dear God, the Parthenon is still broken, collapsing distinctions between a fictional world and reality.

While the exhibition is born from the spaces of Lanthimos’ cinema, the exhibition presents a new world altogether, untethered from narrative, time, and place; one which firmly establishes Lanthimos’ place within the contemporary photographic canon.