Out of his entire literary work, his first collection of poetry, titled Ypsikaminos, stands out as the first purely surrealist Greek text.

[3] Among his prose works, his bold erotic novel The Great Eastern was completed over a period of several decades becoming the lengthiest modern Greek novel.

His first poetic collection, Ipsikaminos (ie blast furnace), was a heretic book, characterized by the lack of the punctuation and the peculiarity of the language.

[8] For his part, Embirikos's son, Leonidas, has referred to his father's "vast, vertiginously extensive photographic archive... the negatives alone exceeding 30,000 items".

[9] Embirikos only ever publicly exhibited his photographs once in his lifetime, showing a limited number of prints at the Ilissos gallery in Athens, in 1955.

However, as part of the celebrations for the centenary of his birth in 2001, the photographer and critic John Stathatos (Γιάννης Σταθάτος) was commissioned to research the archive and curate a large exhibition at the Technopolis Arts Centre in Athens.