Unlike the gloriously grotesque imagery in his films, Yorgos Lanthimos’ photographs are quietly beautiful

It is, by now, a well-known fact that Yorgos Lanthimos’ films are not for the faint of heart. Delighting in the strange and absurd, he first made a name for himself with Dogtooth (2009): a film in which a domineering father imprisons his three adult children in a fenced compound, cut off from the outside. If Poor Things (2023) was a Victorian sadomodernist twist on the ‘Born Sexy Yesterday’ trope, his latest, Kinds of Kindness (2024), offers up a spectacle of cruelty – featuring, among other kinds of evil, brainwashing sex cults, murder, rape, domestic violence, and cannibalism. In Lanthimos’ worlds, humanity is stripped of moral pretension; his characters obey inscrutable logics, inflicting Haneke-like violence with malevolent glee.

Given the content of these films, it might then seem an odd choice to describe the behind-the-scenes stills from these productions as beautiful. But two books, Dear God, the Parthenon is still broken (Void, 2024) – shot during the filming of Poor Things – and i shall sing these songs beautifully (Mack, 2024) – made alongside Kinds of Kindness – prove otherwise. Now, an exhibition at Webber Gallery in Los Angeles, in collaboration with publisher Mack, collates images from both books in the first public presentations of Lanthimos’ photography.

While his films use visceral grotesquery to unsettle, his photography adopts a radically different strategy: one of absence and suggestion. An empty pool – familiar to those who’ve seen Kinds of Kindness – is bathed in afternoon light; a desolate film-set town with buildings clad in scaffolding. Drawing from Sappho’s surviving fragments, Lanthimos’ photographs, in their stillness, take on a life of their own: self-contained places, uncanny and unresolved, that ask the viewer to sit with their strangeness.

Much was made of Poor Things set design at the time of its release: conjuring a world that is at once extravagant, delirious, and pieced together like a dream hoarded in Bella’s mind. Lanthimos, chasing the uncanny gloss of Old Hollywood, shot on a studio lot, where painted backdrops stood in for sky and horizon. In Budapest, four vast, Escher-esque sets sprawled across giant soundstages to create London and Lisbon. In Lanthimos’ photos, we see the making of Bella’s universe; a cherry picker against a blazing amber sea, Jerrod Carmichael (who plays a noble philosopher in the film, introducing Bella to ideas of socialism and existentialism) leaning against the cruise ship’s railings. Photos of limp legs, limbs, and obscured faces channel Kubrick’s penchant for the eerie, using bodies as objects suspended between life and artifice. Unlike the controlled chaos of his films, these images capture something quieter – a moment between action and inaction, between performance and reality.

There is, however, a different story at play on the Kinds of Kindness sets. Lanthimos’ eye lingers on the in-between spaces here: vacant rooms that once held spectacle and the detritus left in the wake of storytelling. It’s a new kind of world-building – not the feverish excess of Poor Things, but something more ghostly and forensic. What does it mean to make a world within a world, then, only to abandon it? In Lanthimos’ films, illusion is heightened to the point of absurdity. Yet his photography strips that deception bare, inviting us to consider what he has discarded: the melancholy of a half-built dream.

Yorgos Lanthimos: Photographs is on from 29 March until 24 May 2025 at Webber Gallery LA, in collaboration with Mack, webberrepresents.com

i shall sing these songs beautifully is published by Mack, £40 from mackbooks.co.uk