i shall sing these songs beautifully extends Yorgos Lanthimos’s distinctive cinematic imagination into the form of a photobook. Published by MACK in 2024, it gathers photographs made by Lanthimos on the set of Kinds of Kindness (2024), his latest feature at the time of publication. Rather than functioning as straightforward production documentation, the images occupy an unstable territory between the actual locations of New Orleans and the constructed elsewhere of cinema.

The book’s colour and black-and-white photographs helped shape the world of the film before becoming material for a separate narrative. Lanthimos treats them as fragments: partial, atmospheric, and suggestive rather than explanatory. Familiar places acquire an uneasy charge, while the relationship between people and their surroundings remains deliberately unresolved. The result is a photographic sequence that extends the tensions and unsettling absurdity associated with his cinema without simply illustrating it.

Interwoven with the images are new texts by Lanthimos, whose broken, lyrical qualities evoke the poetry of Sappho. The title itself is drawn from that poetic source, and the writing gives the photographs another register in which to operate—less as records of a shoot than as elements in an invented, haunted story. This exchange between image and text is central to the book’s character, allowing cinema, photography, and literary allusion to remain in productive friction.

For collectors, the book is significant as a direct record of Lanthimos’s analogue photographic practice and as an autonomous extension of a filmic project. His use of analogue film, in both still and moving image, reflects an interest in the medium’s intimate, materially involved process. At 112 pages in a hardback edition from MACK, the volume offers a concentrated encounter with an auteur’s visual language at the point where a film’s world is being formed—and where that world begins to exceed the film itself.