Cinema has long claimed narrative as its natural territory. Movement, continuity, sound, duration: these are the instruments through which stories learned to unfold. Photography, by contrast, was assigned a quieter role. It records, preserves, arrests. When photographers attempt narrative, they often borrow it from film, arranging still images into sequences that imitate motion, causality, or plot. The photobook, in this lineage, becomes a slow storyboard, a silent movie on paper.
Yorgos Lanthimos has taken a more exacting path. In three photobooks published between 2024 and 2026 — Dear God, the Parthenon is still broken, i shall sing these songs beautifully, and the forthcoming VISCIN — he does not adapt cinema to photography. He dismantles cinema’s authority over narrative and reconstructs storytelling within the material and temporal logic of the book.
This is not an indulgent side practice. It is a sustained inquiry into what narrative becomes once it abandons motion, once continuity fractures, once time ceases to flow obediently forward. Across these volumes, Lanthimos proposes a sequence of narrative states: construction, collapse, and reconstruction. The trilogy does not document films. It displaces them. It relocates authorship from projection to sequence, from screen to paper, from spectacle to duration.
In an image culture saturated by movement, by streams and fragments that vanish as soon as they appear, this gesture is neither nostalgic nor decorative. It is polemical. It asserts that narrative is not the natural property of cinema, and that photography — organised deliberately in book form — may now be the medium better equipped to think about time.
Construction
The first book, Dear God, the Parthenon is still broken, begins not with memory but with labour. It emerges from the set of Poor Things, in Budapest, where nineteenth-century Europe was reconstructed inside industrial halls: façades assembled from timber, oceans suspended beneath lighting rigs, cities reduced to scaffolding and paint. It is here, among provisional architectures and borrowed centuries, that Lanthimos begins to photograph.
The decisive gesture comes early. Rather than frame the fiction, he frames the mechanism. The images widen until illusion enters the edge of its own picture. Screens hover behind actors. Ladders interrupt skies. Cables trail across floors meant to signify marble and stone. Crew members linger at the margins like witnesses who refuse to leave.
This is not behind-the-scenes photography in the familiar sense. There is no anecdote, no explanatory impulse, no charm of access. The gesture is structural. Lanthimos fabricates what he has called “a new story within the story,” but the story is not about characters or plot. It is about construction itself.
Narrative, here, is not dismantled. It is rendered visible.
The emotional charge of these images arises precisely from this visibility. The actors remain convincing, the gestures exact, the atmospheres dense with suggestion. Yet the tenderness is inseparable from the knowledge that everything rests on fragile systems of support. History is an arrangement. Fantasy is a scaffolding problem. Time is a painted backdrop.
The method reinforces the argument. Lanthimos works with large-format cameras, slowing the tempo of production. Composition is fixed. Exposure delayed. Where cinema accelerates, photography hesitates. After filming, he and Emma Stone retreat into improvised bathroom darkrooms, standing over trays late into the night, counting seconds, watching images rise slowly from chemistry.
Stone has described the work as a discipline of attention, a “high-stakes meditation.” The phrase matters. Meditation implies withdrawal from production logic, an interval carved out of velocity. These photographs are not extracted from cinema. They are cultivated alongside it, in parallel time.
The book’s structure performs the same hesitation. Vast gatefolds open across the page, revealing architectural panoramas that exceed the codex. The reader opens a book within a book, discovering seams and edges that resist closure. Space is not illustrated; it is enacted.
The title itself comes from a line cut from the film: a postcard never sent, addressed to God, reporting that the Parthenon remains broken. The sentence hovers between comedy and mourning. A monument once meant to signify permanence now stands incomplete, suspended between ruin and restoration. The phrase becomes emblematic. Civilisations, like sets, are provisional. Stories, like monuments, are always under repair.
In this first volume, narrative remains intact, but newly exposed. The book is not yet about memory or time. It is about construction. Before stories can fracture or renew, they must first be seen being built.
Memory
The second book, i shall sing these songs beautifully, moves in the opposite direction. Where the first is dense with apparatus, the second empties out. Published later the same year and drawn from photographs made during Kinds of Kindness in New Orleans, it inhabits a quieter, more unstable territory.
The title, borrowed from Sappho, establishes the method. Sappho survives in fragments. Her poems are known through absences, through lines that end too soon, through missing stanzas that shape what remains. Lanthimos adopts this condition not as homage but as principle.
The photographs are no longer anchored in sets or crews. Apparatus disappears. Architecture dissolves into atmosphere. Faces detach from characters. Gestures hover without conclusion. Streets and interiors refuse to declare whether they belong to cinema or to the city.
Interspersed through the book are brief texts by Lanthimos — neither captions nor explanations. They interrupt rather than clarify. They behave like marginal notes written long after the event, reminders without context, memories that have lost their owners.
Analogue process becomes decisive. Grain, tonal drift, chemical variation are no longer aesthetic flourishes but carriers of time. These images were part of the formation of the film’s world. In the book, they become what survives after formation has ended.
Sequencing abandons causality. Images no longer lead to one another. They brush past. White space opens between them. The codex becomes intimate again. Page turns slow the eye. Reading acquires the rhythm of breathing.
What emerges is not narrative but memory. Not recollection, but after-image. The photographs do not describe events. They remember atmospheres. They preserve tensions without resolving them.
Where the first volume exposes how worlds are constructed, the second records what lingers when worlds dissolve. Cinema recedes almost completely. What remains are traces: glances that never found their scenes, rooms that never found their stories, light that no longer knows what it once illuminated.
Here narrative does not break through violence. It fades.
This withdrawal marks the trilogy’s central risk. Without architecture, without apparatus, without continuity, storytelling approaches extinction. The book tests how little structure narrative can survive with before it becomes mere accumulation. It is here that Lanthimos comes closest to abandoning story altogether.
Yet the abandonment is not nihilistic. It is diagnostic. Before narrative can be rebuilt, it must first be allowed to disappear.
Duration
The third volume, VISCIN, scheduled for publication in March 2026, takes a different risk. For the first time, Lanthimos does not merely dismantle narrative but attempts to reconstruct it.
The photographs were made around the production of Bugonia, but the book announces itself as untethered from the film and its conventions. This is not modesty. It is a claim of independence. The photobook ceases to orbit cinema and begins to assert narrative authority of its own.
The images follow a progression from foreboding to violence to renewal, moving gradually from black and white into colour. The arc is not a plot in the traditional sense. It is closer to metamorphosis.
The form is decisive. Bound as an accordion, the book abolishes the page. There are no turns, no margins, no pauses. The sequence unfolds as a single continuous ribbon, invoking the unspooling of a film reel while denying cinematic projection. Reading becomes a physical act. The reader must manage space, length, gravity. Time is no longer implied. It is handled.
Without interruption, images lose autonomy. Each bleeds into the next. Meaning accumulates not through interpretation but through pressure. Duration becomes subject matter.
Here the book performs what cinema usually represents. Instead of projecting time, it enforces it. The reader cannot skip. There is no montage, no cut, no compression. Sequence becomes ordeal.
Yet the arc does not terminate in darkness. Colour emerges cautiously, as if unsure of its legitimacy. Renewal arrives not as triumph but as tentative re-entry. After collapse and memory, narrative returns — not as story, but as transformation.
This is the trilogy’s most radical proposition. Narrative need not be linear, nor causal, nor continuous. It can exist as duration alone, as the slow accumulation of pressure across images that refuse to separate themselves.
Here the photobook ceases to describe time and begins to perform it.
After Cinema
Across the three volumes, narrative undergoes a deliberate migration. In the first book, it is exposed as construction. In the second, it dissolves into memory. In the third, it is rebuilt through duration.
What unites them is sequencing. Authorship resides less in what is photographed than in how photographs are arranged. Meaning emerges not from representation but from relation.
This places Lanthimos within a lineage of photobook makers for whom sequence is primary language — Robert Frank, Duane Michals, Sophie Calle, Allan Sekula — yet his intervention remains distinctive. He brings to the book a cinematic intelligence only to dismantle cinema’s narrative monopoly from within.
He does not translate films into photographs. He relocates storytelling into paper, rhythm, and time.
Material form becomes argument. Gatefold exposes architecture. Codex produces memory. Accordion enforces duration. Design becomes thinking.
At a moment when images circulate endlessly without consequence, these books reintroduce friction. They slow looking. They demand patience. They make time visible again.
More importantly, they suggest that storytelling need not reside in motion or continuity. It can survive in construction, in residue, in duration. It can exist without spectacle.
Taken together, the trilogy constitutes one of the most sustained contemporary meditations on narrative after cinema. Not a side practice, not a diversion, but a quiet reorientation of authorship.
These are not books about films.
They are books about what stories become when cinema falls silent — and time, at last, is allowed to speak.
Images © Yorgos Lanthimos. Courtesy of VOID and MACK.
Books available from Void and Mack, and in Australia through Perimeter Books
