Before his return to the Oscars, Yorgos Lanthimos finds a still moment in Athens

ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Oscar-nominated filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos paused his filmmaking and promotion schedule this week to celebrate a quieter creative pursuit: photography.

The 52-year-old Greek director on Friday inaugurated an exhibition of his photographs in his hometown of Athens, presenting images he has taken over the past five years — many captured while making his films, wandering through movie sets and nearby neighborhoods, or on trips back to Greece.

The exhibition gathers 182 still photographs, in color and in black and white, from the filmmaker known for his distinctive — and often disturbing — cinematic style. It opens days before Lanthimos returns to Hollywood for the March 15 Academy Awards ceremony. In his latest film, “Bugonia,” a pair of conspiracy‑obsessed men kidnap a powerful female executive they accuse of being an alien.

The movie received four Oscar nominations, including best picture and best actress for Emma Stone, along with nods for adapted screenplay and original score. The photos, all shot with a film camera, features several portraits of Stone, a frequent star in his films.

Lanthimos on Friday said he was happy to dive into something different. Photography, he said, began for him as a technical foundation for filmmaking but gradually became something more personal.

“In film school you learn that cinema is basically 24 photographs per second,” he said. “So photography is where it all begins.”

Over time, working with still images opened a creative outlet separate from the complex machinery of movie production, he added.

“You can be alone with a camera, walking without having something specific in mind,” Lanthimos said. “A photograph can have value on its own, but many photographs together can create another kind of value.”

For Lanthimos, photography also offers something cinema rarely can: immediacy.

“You create something and almost immediately it exists,” he said, describing the process of shooting and developing film in a darkroom. “You can take a photograph, print it and hold it in your hands. That satisfaction is very direct.”

While Lanthimos remains one of contemporary cinema’s most distinctive filmmakers, he said photography will play a growing role in his creative life.

Unlike movies, he said, photographs are free to evolve long after they are taken.

“You can present them in a book, in an exhibition, combine them in different ways,” Lanthimos said. “There’s a freedom in photography that is very exciting.”

The exhibition at the Onassis Foundation runs through May 17.