Lanthimos at Foam
A director's stills, without the plot
Yorgos Lanthimos's photographs reach Foam in Amsterdam in February 2027, after Athens and Los Angeles, with the director saying what he finds in still pictures that film leaves out.
A coffee cup sits at the edge of a picture. Webber Gallery's description of Yorgos Lanthimos's photographs says the debris of the film set, "scaffolding, lighting rigs, and a coffee cup," appears on the periphery of the images. The director left the set in the frame.
Those pictures are headed to Amsterdam. Hypebeast reports that nearly 180 works by Lanthimos will be on view at Foam from February 12 through June 6, 2027. According to Hypebeast, the show was organized with the London-based publisher MACK and centers on shots taken over the last six years, many from behind the scenes of recent films. It presents four bodies of work. Three are behind-the-scenes photographs from Bugonia (2025), Kinds of Kindness (2024) and Poor Things (2023). The fourth is an ongoing personal series photographing Greece, his home, in black and white. Michael Mack returns as guest curator. The dates, the count and the description of the four bodies of work all come from Hypebeast's report.
Amsterdam follows two earlier shows. The Onassis Foundation says its Athens exhibition ran 15 March to 10 May 2026 and was the first in Greece of his photographs. It brought together four bodies of 182 still photographs made over the past five years. The Greek pictures were compiled, the Onassis page says, "during solitary walks around the edges of the city of Athens and on visits to islands in the Aegean Sea." The show was designed as a classical Greek temple with 110 new works in a central altar-like space, and all prints were hand printed from the negatives. The Los Angeles Times reported that his first gallery exhibition opened at Webber 939 gallery in L.A.'s Arts District.
Those counts do not line up neatly. Hypebeast says six years and nearly 180 works; Onassis says five years and 182 for Athens. Neither source says whether Amsterdam shows the same selection as Athens.
How the pictures were made is less in doubt. The LA Times says Lanthimos developed film in a makeshift darkroom he rigged in the bathroom of his Budapest apartment, and that the prints in Los Angeles were made entirely photochemically, with "not a single digitized step." It says the Poor Things portraits were made on 4x5 film plates in a Chamonix camera. In the Kinds of Kindness pictures, subjects often pose with their faces obscured or turned away from the lens. Lanthimos told W Magazine his portrait of Hunter Schafer caught her "between playing a character and taking a break out of that."
Then there is what he says about why. Onassis quotes him: "It feels like there are fewer rules tied to conventional narrative." He told the LA Times: "For some reason, we’re more lenient with photography being less narrative, which is something that I love." He told W: "But lately, I’ve had the need for my pictures to be something other than the film." Hypebeast reports that he announced a break from filmmaking after Bugonia's release last year. W quotes him wanting to concentrate more on photography now that he needs a break from filming after three films back to back. Hypebeast also quotes a recent interview, outlet not named: "You can be alone, with a camera in your hand, and you can walk."
Webber's description says its exhibition presents a world "untethered from narrative, time, and place." Mack, on the Athens show, calls Lanthimos "a singular talent in the use of a camera lens to build narratives." He told the LA Times that one image "does what all great still photography does, which is suggest a narrative way beyond the frame and the subject." The gallery and the curator describe the work in different terms. Neither source says which description Lanthimos prefers.
Those two descriptions may not be in conflict. A photograph with no plot can still hold a story's pull, and the facts above suggest that is what Lanthimos is after: less machinery of narrative, more of what Mack calls a narrative beyond the frame. The coffee cup at the edge of a picture appears to work that way. It does not explain the image, and it admits the set was there. The faces turned away in Kinds of Kindness do something similar. They withhold, and the viewer fills in.
That slow craft matters here too. A bathroom darkroom, hand prints from negatives and 4x5 plates all slow the picture down, and that may be the point. A director can walk alone with a camera, in his own words, and make something that does not have to answer to the film. That suggests something about constraint: removing a collaborator or a plot is a way of finding out what is left.
The strongest counter-reading is that these are by-products. Three of the four bodies of work come from film sets, and a museum audience may arrive because of the films. If so, the Foam show would borrow from the cinema more than it departs from it. What would change our mind is whether the Greece series, made on solitary walks, holds the room without the film titles beside it, and whether Foam's own materials say how the pictures were chosen. The hang will tell.
“For some reason, we’re more lenient with photography being less narrative, which is something that I love.”
