Yorgos Lanthimos’s absurdist photographs of Greece

In the centre of Athens a new temple displays Yorgos Lanthimos’s personal photographs, taken as he wandered his home country. The images reveal his absurdist eye: a coffin propped against a wall beside a mop, horses with their heads chopped off by foregrounded trees, and a roadside memorial beneath a sign whose wiggly road symbol points directly upwards.

"How you view it depends on your mood," he says; one picture can make you laugh one day and ask, "What happened here?" the next. Earlier works linked to his films sit around the outside of the makeshift temple. Portraits from Poor Things show Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo and Jerrod Carmichael alongside lighting rigs and props, while photographs from Kinds of Kindness lean more toward the aesthetics of American photographers such as Lewis Baltz and Henry Wessel Jr, with Willem Dafoe seen from the back and Stone appearing only as a shadow.

Some pictures collected in his book Viscin were taken during filming of Bugonia, though the book has "virtually nothing" to do with the film.

Greece, Athens

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