Dear God, the Parthenon is still broken

A photography monograph from the set of Poor Things, published by Void

Dear God, the Parthenon is still broken is Yorgos Lanthimos's first photography monograph, published by Void Photo. The photographs were made during the production of Poor Things in Budapest, and the book operates as a self-contained work — not a companion volume, not a making-of document, but a parallel sequence with its own internal logic, untethered from the film's narrative time and place.

The images drift between black and white and colour, moving between a quality of waking dream and documentary stillness. The film's late nineteenth-century locations — London, Lisbon, Marseille, a cruise ship — were all reconstructed in Budapest, and it is these constructed cities and interiors that provide the ground for the photographs. Characters inhabit the imagined spaces while screens, scaffolding, lighting rigs, and crew appear at the edges of the frame. Lanthimos widened the frame deliberately, folding the apparatus of fiction into the image itself. The publication's three 90 cm gatefolds extend this logic: the reader opens a book within a book, each foldout disclosing another layer of the construct. A previously unpublished poem by Patti Smith, written in response to the film, opens the sequence.

The photographic process was shaped by a commitment to slowness. Working with a large-format Chamonix camera — 4×5 black-and-white sheet film and 6×7 colour negatives — Lanthimos fixed each composition before exposure and held it, allowing the image to accumulate rather than be seized. The results carry that deliberateness: grain, tonal range, and a pace that resists the speed of the film set around them.

"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."
— Yorgos Lanthimos

The process extended into a nightly darkroom collaboration with Emma Stone, who played Bella Baxter in the film. After each day's filming, the two developed negatives together in a makeshift bathroom darkroom on location.

"I became involved out of both curiosity and friendship. Yorgos has always photographed both on set and in life, but when he got the Chamonix, I was pretty amazed by the large format and the beginning of his learning to process negatives. One day, I asked if I could try to load some negatives in the little tent he had set up, then moved on to the chemicals, and I became obsessed. 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. It was like getting to be a sous chef, not dissimilar to how I feel with him on set, and I loved the challenge and focus of it."
— Emma Stone

"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…"
— Yorgos Lanthimos

The title derives from a scene that did not survive the final cut: a postcard that Bella Baxter was to send to her father, God, from Athens. The book carries that severed gesture as its name.

The object itself is produced with the same attention as the images: cloth open-spine hardcover with silkscreen, five-colour printing throughout, and three gatefolds that physically enact the book's layered premise.

Other publications by Yorgos Lanthimos available here include The Lobster Screenplay Book and i shall sing these songs beautifully. The book sits within both the Photobooks catalogue and the Film Books & Film Culture section.