Benaki Museum show keeps Nelly’s traces alive

Elli Sougioultzoglou-Seraidari, the renowned interwar photographer Nelly’s who captured highlights of the Greek capital like few others, lived two lives and the second began with a piece in Kathimerini nearly 50 years ago. It was titled “Classifieds” and spoke about “looking for traces of the renowned photographer Nelly’s.” It was written by Rena Angouridou in “Notebook,” a daily column in Kathimerini, which she wrote along with Maria Karavia and Eleni Bistika.

“She called the newspaper straight away and I happened to answer the phone myself,” Karavia recalls. “She had a soft voice, almost childlike, and said, ‘This is Nelly.’”

It was the winter of 1975 and Sougioultzoglou-Seraidari – who was born in Asia Minor, studied in Germany and was a defining force on the Greek photography scene – was living at her ancestral home in the Athens suburb of Nea Smyrni with her husband Angelos Seraidis.

She was 76 years old at the time and had hung up her cameras a decade earlier, when she and her family returned from New York to settle in Greece. It is likely that few people thought of her at this point, but one of them was Kathimerini’s director, Eleni Vlachou, who asked her three columnists: “That photographer, Nelly’s, does anyone know what’s become of her?” None of them did. “Let’s do a couple of lines, like a search,” she said.

“Eleni Vlachou always had her old Leica at the ready in the top drawer of her desk,” writes Maria Karavia in her introductory note for a new publication on Nelly’s by the Benaki Museum which goes with an ongoing retrospective exhibition on the great Greek photographer.

A lot of samples of Nelly’s brilliant career were destroyed during the German Occupation and the Civil War that followed

An accomplished photographer herself, Vlachou had shown a piece on the Parthenon at the International Exhibition in New York in 1939 and been distinguished for it. Nelly’s had traveled to the United States with her husband for that very same exhibition, which was optimistically titled “The World of Tomorrow,” after securing a 23-day residence permit. The Greek pavilion had been designed by a student of famed architect Dimitris Pikionis, Alexandra Moreti, and Nelly’s had teamed up with painter Gerasimos Steris to do a part of its decoration. Several Greek artists showed work at the exhibition – among them Konstantinos Parthenis, Nikos Engonopoulos, Giorgos Zongolopoulos and Voula Papaioannou – while Nelly’s participated with five pieces from the black-and-white collage “Parallels,” earning one of the top prizes for the composition about Santorini. She used the prize money to purchase new photographic equipment and once the successful exhibition ended she organized, with the help of the Greek community in New York, a series of presentations and lectures about her work over the course of the ensuing months.

When she had left Athens for what was originally meant to be a short visit to the United States, she left her brother in charge of her studio at downtown 18 Ermou Street. Then World War II broke out and her trip was extended. She created a new studio in New York, tried to put down roots and struggled to make a living with her husband as both faced financial difficulties. But she also tried her hand at color photography and learned all sorts of new techniques and trends. It ultimately took 27 years before she returned to Greece in 1966, by which time she was largely unknown to the Greek public. She later admitted in her autobiography that she had also kept herself in the shadows – until she saw the note in Kathimerini and Maria Karavia rang her doorbell.

“I still remember that winter afternoon. I was let in by her husband and it was like stepping into a different age,” Karavia recalls. “The lighting was muted and she had traditional Skryian furniture of the kind I hadn’t seen for many years, as well as some beautiful kilims and ceramics. She was quite small and smiling, a lady of a certain age, with a very neat appearance. She wore a barrette, as she always did, to keep her hair from her face. She was standing up at the back of the living room when I walked in.”

As they talked, the quiet woman slowly gave way to the powerful artist whose work had made international history, to the pioneering photographer who changed the esthetics and techniques governing Greek photography in the 1920s and 30s. “Her manner of speaking was simple, without airs and without nostalgia for her previous life,” says Karavia.

There were no photographs on display at the Nea Smyrni apartment, so Karavia asked whether she could be shown a few of her historic images, like the portraits that captured the zeitgeist of Athens’ high society in the interwar years, the neighborhood she had explored with city historian Dimitrios Kambouroglou, and the Delphi Festival she had photographed at the express request of the influential writer Penelope Delta. She declined. “My husband would have to climb up to the overhead storage unit,” Sougioultzoglou-Seraidari said, adding that there wasn’t much to be found there anyway.

As Karavia later learned, a lot of samples of Nelly’s brilliant career were destroyed during the German Occupation and the Civil War that followed. More was lost from a crate of belongings that was being shipped to Greece from the United States and was opened during a stop in Canada. “And as if all that were not enough, a part of the archive from the Ermou Street studio was destroyed during a downpour in Attica. The studio flooded and the negatives got wet and were ruined,” Nelly’s told Karavia. “I still haven’t mustered up the courage to find out what happened to the rest,” she added, though on a more upbeat note, she said she believed she had “thousands of negatives” in the apartment’s storage cupboard.

The article that emerged from that interview – and was one of several to follow after the pair became friends – was published in Kathimerini on November 30, 1975, and titled “If photographs could talk.” The next one, “Scandal at the Parthenon 48 years ago,” was about the iconic series of nude dancers shot by Nelly’s on the Acropolis and shown in Athens between 1925 and 1930. It was that article which reignited interest in the photographer in other newspapers and magazines, and that, in turn, led to television tributes, publications and exhibitions in Greece and abroad. The Greek public in the post-dictatorship era was eager to rediscover her oeuvre, while the state honored her for her contribution to the country’s cultural life.

Nelly’s was much talked about and much admired all the way until her death in 1998, while the fresh interest in her work was pivotal in sparking an interest in the history of Greek photography as a whole. In 1984, meanwhile, she donated her entire body of work to the Benaki Museum, which is now hosting the retrospective “Nelly’s.” Comprehensive, elegantly put together and well-researched, the show, which is curated by the head of the museum’s Photography Archive, Aliki Tsirgialou, is the best way to reconnect the artist to the new generation.

“Nelly’s” is on show at the Benaki Museum’s Pireos Street Annex (138 Pireos & Andronikou, tel 210.345.3111, benaki.org) through July 23.