Poor Things is one of the most critically acclaimed movies of the year so far, and received 11 Oscar nominations across numerous fields including Best Actress – which was won by the exceptional performance by Emma Stone.
The look and style of the film were also recognized with Oscar wins for set and costume design, and director Yorgos Lanthimos, a skilled photographer, captured the beauty of the set and its characters in a new photobook that blurs the lines between fact and fiction.
Dear God, the Parthenon is still broken by Yorgos Lanthimos is published by Void, and takes the reader on a journey between worlds, that of fiction and that of reality. Taken on the various sets used in the making of Poor Things, the photographs drift between black-and-white and color, and capture the characters of the movie in still moments, as though caught in-between existing and not. Although the actors are very much real, the characters they portray seem in some sort of limbo before the cameras start rolling.
Filmed in Budapest, Hungary, the photographs are taken on glamourous 19th-Century sets, including a backdrop of constructed cityscapes, interiors and a cruise ship of the era. Despite this, when framing the images for this book, Lanthimos takes a step back, including the edges of the frame, the scaffolding, lighting, camera crew and rigging, adding further to the feeling of being between worlds.
"Lanthimos has intentionally widened the frame to show the workings of the construct, fabricating a new story within the story," says Void.
"To mirror this, the publication is designed with foldouts to reveal these constructs within the cast of characters – the reader opens a book within a book".
In direct contrast to the fast-paced filming of the movie, Lanthimos uses a large-format film camera to capture the beautiful images in the book, focusing on stillness, tonality, and light. The slow nature of using this type of camera enabled a meditative time of focus while he composed and captured each exposure. What's more, it created a stronger bond between himself and his leading lady – Emma Stone, a recurring subject and collaborator in this project.
Throughout the making of Poor Things and other works such as The Favorite, Lanthimos and Stone have developed a creative relationship. After days of filming, they would both develop the negatives together in a makeshift darkroom in a bathroom, which offered them both a "creative outlet beyond the realm and constraints of the film" they were working on.
"The creative complicity I have with Emma added to the excitement of the task. One would push the other no matter how tired we were after a full day of filming to process the negatives in the evenings," said Lanthimos.
"I always hoped that I would manage to get enough decent pictures to make a book out of them – a body of work that could exist on its own, independent of the film. I didn't know if we had achieved this until we started seeing the initial edits and sequencing of the book".
The process of helping develop the negatives and working in this analog way had a huge impact on Stone.
"One day I asked if I could try to load some negatives in the little tent Yorgos had set up, then moved on to the chemicals, and I became obsessed," said the actress. "The high-stakes meditation of it is very special to me – you have to remain in control, you don’t want to screw up the pictures, and sure, they’re only pictures, but they’re his pictures, his art, not my own.
I remember accidentally clipping a beautiful portrait too low in the drying process and to this day I see the marks I made. It’s of course all I can focus on because it was a mistake. Or when I loaded the film wrong and a few pictures came out with an inch-long black bar. But it’s an instantaneous reminder that all of this – photography, films, life – is full of mistakes and human error that can also end up being very beautiful and alive."
The title of the book comes from a scene that was eventually cut from the movie, but featured Emma Stone's character sending a postcard to her father starting with the words "Dear God, the Parthenon is still broken". On the topic of text, the photobook features a poem from Patti Smith inspired by the movie and created especially for the book.
The volume is beautifully presented and features exceptional imagery, an absolute triumph for Lanthimos' first photography monograph. Those who enjoyed the aesthetics of the movie will absolutely enjoy this book.
Dear God, the Parthenon is still broken by Yorgos Lanthimos is published by Void and is available to preorder now for release at the end of May.
You may also be interested in our guides to the best coffee table books on photography, the best books on fashion photography, and the best books on portrait photography.
