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. 

Tilda Swinton, The Cast, issue 26, 1996

‘This is a real in-between picture. I always love them,’ says Rankin. Shot at London’s Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park, Rankin captured Swinton after her performance in The Maybe. For seven days, eight hours a day, Swinton lay in a glass box as viewers walked around her inviting them to question the idea of mortality. ‘There is a kind of androgyny to this shot but at the same time, because she is doing what she is doing, it feels like Swinton has broken the fourth wall between you and her.’

Back in the early 1970s, San Francisco photographer Michael Jang had a Chronicle press pass. And one from Rolling Stone. And one from the New York Times. None of them were real. In that analog era, he would snap a picture of a publication’s logo, add his headshot and an illegible scrawl to mimic an editor’s signature and then laminate it. Laminating was important to put across the illusion that the California Institute of the Arts student was an accredited photographer as he wrangled his way into events to take pictures of luminaries like Frank Sinatra.

“I think there is a statute of limitations on that,” Jang laughed in a recent conversation with the Chronicle as he described the moxie with which he began his career. “I was very young compared to the Associated Press (photographers). They would say, ‘Oh, God, the kid’s here again.’ ”

The story of a nascent photographer making his own luck is related in “Who Is Michael Jang? ,” Michael Jacobs’ account of Jang and his art that is one of the opening night films of the 23rd San Francisco Documentary Festival. Jacobs captures the twists and turns of Jang’s trajectory: the Marysville native’s shift from shooting celebrities to capturing images of relatives in Pacifica, street scenes in San Francisco, and the Bay Area’s ’70s era punk scene before settling into the life of a portrait photographer while he raised a family. In 2002, at 50, Jang submitted his work to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art when the museum put out an open call for portfolios, launching a new phase of his career. 

More recently, he’s adopted a playful alter ego, Chef Jang. He has also become a graffiti artist, enlarging those 50-year-old photos of his family into large wheat-paste murals that he plastered on walls throughout the city.

“If I were to pick an artist, whether you like the person’s work or not, Andy Warhol, his life and all the different arts that he got involved in, is a wonderful model to follow,” Jang said of the breadth of his work. “He did paint. He did photography. He did film. He did music. There was branding in his name and his image. So that kind of takes us back to Chef Jang as a branding or an image. And so, given all that, you know, I have chosen Andy’s method as a template for wide-open ideas and opportunities.”

Jacobs was unfamiliar with Jang’s work when he met him at a Pop-Up magazine event at Davies Hall a dozen years ago. While the filmmaker and Barry Jenkins screened a boxing short they co-directed, “King’s Gym,” Jang made a presentation of his photos. The images captivated Jacobs — as did Jang’s personality. He was clever and funny, and his storytelling style would be permeated by a sense of mischievousness.

Jacobs, a longtime documentary maker who recently made “Marvel Behind the Mask” and won a best documentary award at the San Francisco International Film Festival for his short, “The High Five,” began following the photographer on Instagram and exploring his archive. Then during the pandemic as Jang started his graffiti project, Jacobs saw the potential for a documentary made up not just of interviews and Jang’s images, but one that could also incorporate cinema vérité footage of the artist at work. He reached out to Jang over Instagram.

“We had a sit-down meeting at his house,” Jacobs said. “He was so gracious and polite at our first meeting and was open to the documentary, and it just kind of built from there.

“We wanted this to be an extended conversation about who Michael is and allow the audience to explore him and his work, whether it’s at museums or Instagram or on the streets.”

Other filmmakers had approached Jang over the years, but Jacobs was different. When the artist saw that Jacobs made films for Disney and HBO, he saw that he was dealing with a pro who would make a more personal documentary than he normally does. Jang had the sense that he would not merely be the subject of the film, but also a collaborator.

Indeed, Jacobs describes “Who Is Michael Jang?” as more collaborative than any other film he’s done, a partnership that is both a strength and a necessity.

“First and foremost, I needed his archive,” Jacobs said. “I really needed him to give us material. And the more I shared with him, the more material he was comfortable giving. And he had some really great ideas about storytelling. And some great ideas about his archive.”

Jang’s next project is a 45rpm single that he describes as conceptual art, a recording from 1965 of his high school garage band. And while he is the subject, not the director, “Who Is Michael Jang?” represents another facet in a practice that is always evolving. 

“I’ve always had cinema envy as an art form, because with cinema, you have script, music, photography, and you have a captive audience for the duration of the film,” Jang said. “Then there’s that collective experience that the audience has that walking by a picture on a wall doesn’t have. I find this documentary very fulfilling at this stage of my work and life, to have gone from a still image on a wall to the big screen.”

Pam Grady is a freelance writer.