The images in Yorgos Lanthimos’ first photography exhibition were captured while the filmmaker was shooting Kinds of Kindness (2024) and Poor Things (2023), but you wouldn’t be able to tell by looking at them. Except for the actress Hunter Schafer in one stark portrait, all of his subjects remain anonymous. Synecdoche abounds, fitting for a director whose plots, on paper, read like the premises for riddles (most often delivered eloquently). A pair of high heels stands on a sidewalk—is their owner coming or going? Faces are always turned away, suggesting an even more riveting world beyond the viewer’s perception. The everyday marvel of seeing the unseen emerges as a theme; one particularly arresting photograph calls attention to a depression on a leather couch cushion whose crinkles appear almost perverse, left by some visiting phantom. (This is one of very few color photos; after viewers lose themselves in black and white, the couch’s brown hue itself registers as supernatural.) The show is worth perusing, even if you haven’t watched his films—perhaps especially if you haven’t watched them, so that the invisible might come more clearly into focus. 

Yorgos Lanthimos: Photographs
MACK and Webber
939 S. Santa Fe Ave.,
Los Angeles, CA 90021
On view through June 21st, 2025