The most revealing thing about a photograph can often be what does not appear. Not the subject itself, nor the story it supposedly tells, but the space just out of frame – absent details, unanswered questions. Like a kind of unresolved, borderless narrative, unable to be confined. It is perhaps fitting, then, that Michael Mack, founder and publisher of MACK, is currently helping re-frame one of contemporary cinema’s most distinctive directors in a way most might not know him as: a photographer whose work resists explanation.

Speaking to RUSSH from London, Mack describes the evolution of his ongoing collaboration with Yorgos Lanthimos as a deliberate departure from his filmmaking. In the pages of their latest project, VISCIN – a photo book drawn from images Lanthimos made while shooting his latest film Bugonia – both Lanthimos and Mack find synergy when it comes to embracing ambiguity, abstraction and the uniquely personal experience of perception.

Although the photographs were made during the film’s creation, Mack begins our conversation by keenly emphasising that they operate according to an entirely different logic.

“The book is a time capsule of a period when Yorgos was making Bugonia on sets in Atlanta, Georgia and Henley, England, straying around the edges of the two locations, making images," Mack tells me. "I think what you see with this body of work is that, while it’s obviously related to the set and the surrounds of Bugonia, he is moving even further away from the specific narrative thread and the specific sites of the film.

"Yorgos is highly skilled in making use of the medium, for example its capacity for abstraction; taking a subject and untethering it from its context."

Rather than documenting production, Mack explains that Lanthimos wandered at its edges, photographing tangential details and peripheral moments. Together, the two distilled that archive into a carefully edited sequence that ultimately became a sculptural, leporello-fold book.

“He had this idea of wanting to make a leporello fold book," Mack says. "[Lanthimos] liked the idea of this unspooling of the story and making a sculptural object as its analog form.”

For Mack, the project’s significance lies precisely in its refusal to function as a companion piece to the film. “As a consequence, it really takes you completely away from the very particular nature of the movie and the experience of watching a movie,” he says. “It's an entirely distinct experience. It's not a piece of merch put out in relation to the promotion of the film.”

That separation reflects something Mack has increasingly come to admire about Lanthimos himself. Despite being one of the most celebrated directors working today, he remains, in Mack’s description, almost temperamentally unsuited to the machinery surrounding contemporary cinema.

“It’s really enjoyable working with Yorgos, he has a generous lightness of touch – he’s quite shy and retiring, which is common to a lot of photographers I have met.”

For Mack, photography offers Lanthimos a space of independence from the scale of filmmaking. A film set may involve hundreds of collaborators, layers of financing and months of promotional obligations. Photography, by contrast, allows for solitude, experimentation and uncertainty. It is a medium which can nebulously remain unresolved.

Looking through the images in the VISCIN project, Mack repeatedly returns to their resistance to fixed interpretation. In Mack’s view, this quality aligns Lanthimos with a broader photographic tradition that values this idea of suggestion over prescription. For him, the most compelling photographs do not provide answers; they create the right conditions for speculation.

“Actually, it’s what you don’t see in the frame of a photograph that is often where the power of the image lies; the way in which it invokes wonderful leaps of imagination," Mack says. "That’s great photography – when you look at a picture and it pulls your mind into tangents of narrative beyond what is simply described in the picture.”

The idea feels especially relevant to Lanthimos, whose films often operate through omission, absurdity and implication. Yet Mack is careful not to collapse the two practices into one. Indeed, much of his work has involved convincing audiences to stop reading the photographs through the lens of the films.

When the pair first began collaborating, Mack recalls pushing back against the obvious appeal of celebrity. Even in the pages of VISCIN, there are images featured of actors like Emma Stone or Jesse Plemons , but these held little interest for him as publishing propositions. "There's a picture [in i shall sing these songs beautifully] of Margaret Qualley where her face is small," Mack says. "And there are a few where you can identify the actors. But it's really not about that. It becomes this other exploration of his process working at the edges of his filmmaking"

Mack encouraged Lanthimos to pursue these quieter, stranger moments he was making between setups – which culminated in a photographic retrospective that ran from March until May this year at Onassis Stegi in Athens. It was the first-ever exhibition in Greece of photographs by Lanthimos, and brought together four bodies of 182 still photographs made over the course of the past five years.

“It's a very big body of work he's been making for four or five years, which is just him with a camera, walking around Athens, the edges of Athens and the Aegean islands on his own,” Mack says.

That project represents what Mack sees as the true centre of Lanthimos’ photographic practice: “You go and walk into this light well, and suddenly it's like, 'Oh, my God, this is like a whole other thing'.” Installed separately from work connected to his films, the exhibition guides viewers to an altar-like secluded space devoted entirely to these personal photographs.

"It’s what you don’t see in the frame of a photograph that is often where the power of the image lies; the way in which it invokes wonderful leaps of imagination. That’s great photography – when you look at a picture and it pulls your mind into tangents of narrative beyond what is simply described in the picture."

This centrepiece series is titled no word for blue, a name Mack finds particularly revealing. Referencing the absence of a specific word for blue in Ancient Greek, the title becomes a meditation on "this idea of linguistic relativity”.

For a publisher whose career has been devoted to sequencing images into books, questions of interpretation remain endlessly fascinating. A photo book, Mack argues, is never experienced in a single fixed way. Readers move through it differently, enter at different points and construct different meanings.

“Most people don’t read a book from the beginning to the end every time… I’m always thinking about that when making books; that sense of it being accessible from every vantage point and the related seepage of ideas. I guess it’s similar in a gallery installation. You can approach a wall out of step with any pre-determined sequence and go left or right.”

You can purchase a copy of VISCIN from the MACK website or via select retailers.

VISCIN (2026) by Yorgos Lanthimos is published by MACK. Yorgos Lanthimos: Photographs exhibition at Onassis Stegi in Athens runs from March 7, 2026, to May 17, 2026.