Yorgos Lanthimos Photographs: The first-ever exhibition in Greece of photographs by the renowned director, producer, and screenwriter at Onassis Stegi

A rare artistic event: the first-ever photography exhibition by the internationally acclaimed director, producer, and screenwriter to be presented in Greece.

“Photography has become an important part of my life, beyond cinema. It gives me much greater freedom; I feel there are fewer rules connected to conventional storytelling.” – Yorgos Lanthimos

Yorgos Lanthimos, one of the most distinctive auteurs in world cinema, has gained international recognition for creating imaginative worlds and bold, often paradoxical explorations of human relationships, qualities that have established him as one of the most unique voices in contemporary film. Now, at the Onassis Foundation’s Stegi, we will experience a rare artistic event: the largest photography exhibition of Lanthimos’s work ever held in a cultural institution.

The exhibition Photographs, from March 7 to May 17, offers the public an unprecedented encounter with his now-famous visual language, here unfolded in a different medium: photography, a cinematic eye capturing fleeting moments and freezing them into timeless stillness. The Onassis Stegi has consistently demonstrated its interest in photography through a series of significant exhibitions, including those of Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton, Christian Boltanski, and Juergen Teller.

In his first collaboration with Stegi, Lanthimos brings together four series of works, comprising a total of 182 photographs from the past five years, offering new perspectives on the deeper understanding of this singular and idiosyncratic visionary. The exhibition includes three photographic series born from the sets of his films. These are images captured on the periphery of shooting locations in cities such as New Orleans, Atlanta, and Henley-on-Thames (UK), as well as in studios in Budapest, where entire cities were constructed as cinematic sets.

Many of the photographs appear in his recent books: Dear God, the Parthenon Is Still Broken (2024), featuring images taken during the filming of Poor Things (2023); i shall sing these songs beautifully (2024), created alongside the film Stories of Kindness (2024); and viscin (2026), which presents previously unpublished photographs from the set of his latest film, Vougonía (2025). The fourth series is being shown for the first time worldwide and consists of an ongoing collection of personal photographs taken in his homeland, Greece.

In these images, captured during solitary walks on the outskirts of Athens and visits to Greek islands, Lanthimos focuses with a calm, contemplative eye on the everyday and the mundane, exploring the medium’s capacity for abstraction and transformation. Across his photographic work, there is a thoughtful engagement with the ordinary and familiar. Through his lens, he conveys the immediacy of his subjects with unparalleled clarity and intimacy, depicting a world that is both unique and complex. As in his cinema, a language emerges that functions as an archive of creation itself, a luminous depiction of phenomena.

Designed in the form of a classical Greek temple, the exhibition creates a central space reminiscent of an altar, displaying 110 new works by Lanthimos, while the outer perimeter features three series connected to his films, allowing visitors to move from his familiar work into the inner core of his new photographic practice.