Yorgos Lanthimos has been nominated for six Academy Awards. The director, producer and screenwriter is behind some of the most ambitious and celebrated films of the past decade, including The Favourite (2018), Poor Things (2023) and Bugonia (2025). His accolades include a BAFTA Award, a Golden Globe Award, the Jury Prize at Cannes and the Golden Lion at Venice. The Greek creative has long made photography part of his artistic practice, often turning the lens on his own film sets and actors. Foam Amsterdam has now announced a major museum exhibition that brings together four series made over the past six years, offering a new perspective on this unique visionary.
The exhibition, which opens in February 2027, will include three photographic series born from the spaces of Lanthimos’ cinema – made on the fringes of film locations in New Orleans, Atlanta and Henley-on-Thames, and in the recreated cities built as sets on soundstages in Budapest. Many of the photographs appear in his photobooks: Dear God, the Parthenon is still broken (2024), made during the filming of Poor Things (2023); i shall sing these songs beautifully (2024), made alongside Kinds of Kindness (2024); and VISCIN (2026), a series of photographs made on the set of Bugonia (2025). Here, viewers are given a behind-the-scenes glimpse of a Lanthimos project, from a candid shot of Emma Stone as Poor Things’ Bella Baxter, to black-and-white snaps of sets, often taken in a fleeting moment between directorial duties.
The fourth body of work is an ongoing series of personal photographs made in his native Greece. Titled no word for blue and compiled during solitary walks around the edges of the city of Athens and on visits to Greek islands, Lanthimos brings a quiet, meditative eye to focus on the quotidian and mundane, harnessing the medium’s capacity for abstraction and transformation. Michael Mack, curator of the exhibition and founder of MACK publisher, says: “The ongoing series of black-and-white works made in Greece away from his filmmaking practice marks a new departure, a turning inwards to a known landscape. Emerging within a long tradition of photography applied to document the man-altered landscape, it also reflects an era of self-reflection of his advance progress in developing his own language in photography.”
Lanthimos’ practice is a real testament to what is possible when filmmaking and photography collide. In his world, the film set is a piece of art itself, not just the final product. The moments of creation are worth capturing. This exhibition feels like an expansion of his practice, rather than a departure from it and fans of his work are treated to a real glimpse into his mind. This is a true polymath at work.
Yorgos Lanthimos: Photographs is at Foam, Amsterdam from 12 February – 6 June: foam.org
Words: Emma Jacob
Image Credits:
1. Untitled. Courtesy of Yorgos Lanthimos.
2. Untitled 77, 2021. Courtesy of Yorgos Lanthimos.
3. Yorgos Lanthimos, 2024. Courtesy Yorgos Lanthimos.
4. Yorgos Lanthimos, Untitled 100i, 2021. Courtesy of Yorgos Lanthimos.
