Greek imagining Greece - selected photographs by Elli Sougioultzoglou-Seraidari "Nelly's"

 

Among the models pictured here are dancers Elizaveta "Lila" Nikolska, Mona Paiva, Alexandros Iolas, and Olympic athlete Dimitrios Karabatis.

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Elli Sougioultzoglou-Seraidari (3 November 1899, Aidini, Asia Minor - 8 August 1998), Greek photographer, better known as Nelly's*. Born in Aidini (now Aydın) near the Aegean coast of the Anatolian peninsula, she went to study photography in Germany under Hugo Erfurth and Franz Fiedler, in 1920-1921. In 1924, she settled in Greece, where she adopted a nationalistic and conservative approach to her work. Her style coincided with the Greek state's desire to produce an idealized view of the country and its people, for internal as well as external - touristic - purposes; she was later appointed official photographer of the newly established Greek Ministry of Tourism. 

She has been referred to as "the Greek Leni Riefenstahl" partly due to her collaboration with the authoritarian Metaxas Regime (1936–1941). Her idealized view of Greece was in sync with the propaganda aims of General Metaxas, her work helping to illustrate the idea of a racial continuity of the Greeks since Antiquity, which was at the core of Metaxas' agenda, the so-called "Third Hellenic Civilization" that had parallels with Nazi Germany's Third Reich. In 1936, she photographed the Berlin Olympic Games and, in 1939, she was commissioned with the decoration of the interior of the Greek pavilion at the New York's World Fair. 

While at New York for the World's Fair in 1939, she decided not to return to Greece. In the United States she continued her commercial portraiture and further developed her work in advertising. She also maintained links with powerful Greeks, including shipowners Stavros Niarchos and Aristotle Onassis, and developed contacts with the White House. She briefly travelled to Greece in 1949, but returned permanently in 1966 and, together with her husband Angelos Seraidaris, settled in Nea Smyrni, South Athens, and gave up photography.

She donated her archives and cameras to the Benaki Museum in Athens in 1985. Two years later, she was presented with an honorary diploma and medal by the Hellenic Centre of Photography and the government, in 1993 she was awarded the Order of the Phoenix by the president of the Greek Republic and, in 1996, the Athens Academy presented her with its Arts and Letters Award. She died two years later at the age of ninety-eight.

* There has been some disagreement as to how she should be credited. She adopted the diminutive "Nelly" for her professional portrait work, and "Nelly's", was incorporated in her decorative studio stamp. But she never referred to herself as Nelly's. That version of her name was popularized by the media at the time of her rediscovery in the 1980s. She is now increasingly referred to, more correctly, as "Elli Seraidari".