i shall sing these songs beautifully: a photobook by Yorgos Lanthimos
i shall sing these songs beautifully draws on photographs Yorgos Lanthimos made on the set of Kinds of Kindness in New Orleans. Shot on analogue film, these colour and black-and-white images were not made as production stills in any conventional sense. In book form, published by MACK Books, they are reorganised into an autonomous visual sequence — one that operates according to its own internal logic rather than as a record of the film's production.
That reframing is central to the book's identity. The photographs carry the unease and controlled distance recognisable from Lanthimos's films, but here they are released from any documentary obligation. New texts by Lanthimos, their tone shaped in part by the poetry of Sappho — from which the title is drawn — extend the mood without resolving it. The result is a fractured, lyrical structure that resists straightforward reading.
As an object, the book is deliberate and restrained: an embossed hardback with a tipped-in image, compact in format but substantial as a standalone publication. It belongs to the broader Film Books & Film Culture strand of the catalogue, alongside titles that treat cinema as a source for image-making rather than as subject matter alone. For those interested in the intersection of analogue photography, contemporary cinema, and artist-led publishing, it sits alongside The Lobster Screenplay Book as part of Lanthimos's published output beyond the feature film.
Yorgos Lanthimos
Yorgos Lanthimos is a Greek filmmaker, theatre director, and photographer born in Athens in 1973. His films include Dogtooth, The Lobster, The Favourite, Poor Things, and Kinds of Kindness. His practice extends across film, theatre, and photography as interconnected rather than separate fields.
i shall sing these songs beautifully belongs to an ongoing photographic body of work that includes Dear God, the Parthenon is still broken. It is not a side project but a continuation of his image-making practice beyond the feature film.