Nelly (photographer)

Nelly (actually Elli Sougioultzoglou-Seraidari , Greek Έλλη Σουγιουλτζόγλου-Σεραϊδάρη , born November 23, 1899 in Aydın , Ottoman Empire ; † August 8, 1998 in Athens ) was a Greek photographer of the New Objectivity . Her subjects were often nudes and dance shots, but also rural Greece .

biography

Nelly followed her brother to Dresden in 1920 to study painting, but there she turned to photography and worked for Hugo Erfurth and Franz Fiedler , where she learned the method of bromine oil printing . Her motifs were mostly nudes and landscapes. In 1924 she moved to Athens and opened her own photo studio on Ermou Street. Intellectuals in particular valued her modern photography. The nude photo of Mona Paeva from 1925 was printed in the Paris magazine Illustration in 1929 and led to violent protests, Nelly then followed suit and had the Russian (Hungarian?) Dancer Nikolska pose on the Acropolis. Since 1927 she also traveled through Greece as the official photographer of the tourism authority, she shaped a modern-Arcadian image of the country.

In 1936 she met Leni Riefenstahl in Berlin and advised her on the film Olympia . The foreign policy office of the NSDAP acquired image rights for its publication Immortal Hellas from 1937, which had the purpose of establishing a cultural connection. An ideological parallel between an exclusively Spartan ancient Greece and the militaristic German Empire could not be credibly conveyed.

In 1939 her pictures were shown in the Greek pavilion at the World's Fair in New York, a year later the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired pictures by Nelly, followed by exhibitions at the O'Tool Gallery in New York and the Archaeological Museum in Buffalo .

When Greece surrendered in World War II in 1941, she moved permanently to New York, where she started a second career as a photojournalist. She had a studio on 57th Street and her visual language was now very urban. Life magazine first published pictures of Nelly in 1947 . She maintained contacts with the White House and also met Greek personalities such as Aristotle Onassis and Stavros Niarchos . In 1966 she retired and moved to Athens.

As part of the cultural program for the 1992 Olympics, the exhibition Faces from Crete with pictures by Nelly was organized in Barcelona . The International Center of Photography in New York showed a retrospective of her work from 1997–1998 . In 2001/2002 a touring exhibition about her work was shown at her previous places of work (Athens, Dresden, Berlin and New York). The Berlin stop was in the Pergamon Museum , where the photographs were shown in the midst of the ancient sculptures. An additional stop was the Frankfurt Städel .

In 1985 she donated her estate to the Benaki Museum in Athens , and 57 more photos and 700 negatives have been in the Thessaloniki Photography Museum since 1997.

Trivia

Entering the monastic republic of Athos is not permitted for women, and Nelly was not granted an exception either, and so she prepared her husband for taking photos there. When the recordings appeared and were mistakenly attributed to her, it was thought that she was the first woman to outsmart the monks.

literature

• Nelly: Ideal body beauty. Vitus-Verlag, Dresden.
• Pamela Markham: Nelly's. From Athens to New York. Arti. Art today, No. 39, 1998.
• Matthias Harder: Nelly. Dresden - Athens - New York. Prestel, Munich 2001.
• Megakles Rogakos: Elli Souyioultzoglou-Seraidari. American College of Greece. 08/2006. online (english)

supporting documents

1. ^ Esther Sophia Sünderhauf: Greek desire and cultural criticism: the German reception of Winckelmann's ideal of antiquity 1840–1945. P. 196.