Nelly, A Great Hellene Photographer
NELLY, A GREAT HELLENE PHOTOGRAPHER
Elli Souyoultzoglou-Seraidari, or “Nelly” as she is usually referred to –she herself uses the possessive form of her Latin name , Nelly’s , as her artistic signature- was born a century ago in Aidini, Asia Minor and died some years ago in Athens, Hellas.
At the age of six, she began Hellenic school. In July 1919, she lived through the catastrophe of the devastation, by Turkish troops, of the Hellenic town of Aidini. Her family managed to escape, and settled in Smyrna, but Nelly departed the following year for Dresden in Germany in order to study. music and painting. It was there, in September 1922, that news reached her of the holocaust of Smyrna and the massacre of the Hellenes of Asia Minor both commited by the Turks. Her family was one of those which fled and moved to Hellas - which Nelly visited for the first time in 1924, when she went to settle there after completing her studies in photography in Germany.
Although she had set out to study painting, Nelly finally turned towards photography because, in new and difficult circumstances, she needed a speedier way to secure a profession and an income. This explains her initial attraction to oeldruck and bromoil, techniques long known to photographers. These techniques enabled her to see photographs not only as a means of conveying a scene clearly and realistically but also as a method for exploring and expressing her relationship with the world which surrounded her. These same techniques also allowed her to give her subjects a pictorial dimension which went some way towards satisfying her artistic concerns
Virtually throughout her career, Nelly worked thematically, in photographic units, sometimes on her own initiative and sometimes for commissions, usually from the Ministry of Tourism. The classification of her photographs under thematic headings is slightly arbitrary, since she really only gave titles to three to four of the units. However, the task of studying her work and filing her material leads almost inevitably to a thematic classification, which in the context of this presentation focuses on the period between the two World Wars in Hellas, although there are also some photos from her New York period included.
During Olympics in Berlin 1936, Nelly was the official Photographer of Hellenic Government and her work there, together with the work of Leni Riefenstahl, was perfect. Many pictures of her are the nicest portraits of Fuehrer Adolf Hitler and after that she exhibited her work in Athens.
Without seeking attention but working effectively. Nelly achieved something which is the dream of every creative artist: a place in the international artistic Pantheon, to which she laid claim without losing any of the features of her nationality. She had the good fortune to see her photographs published in important periodicals around the world, as was the case with her Evzone of 1940 which made the cover of LIFE when Hellas under many traps of British Intelligence Service entered the Second World War. Despite war, Nelly never forget her love for Germany and Germans,
Although Nelly is part of an extrapolated neo-Romantic tradition, she was always somewhat ahead of her time and thus succeeded in producing a bold blend of the classical and the modern. Her artistic identity is the result of a suspension between these two aesthetics
The treatment of most of her subjects is "classical", with the exception of some of her New York work. However, she worked with uncommon professional conscientiousness and frequently engaged in experimentation, always producing results of the utmost technical and aesthetic refinement,Nelly's acceptance of the subjective element in the image led her to a search for the inwardness of each of her subjects and she was never afraid even to intervene in the factual aspects of the subject. Her understanding of the role of light in the molding of form enabled her to assign to it also the role of accentuating the more profound essence of form, an area in which she modeled her work on painting.
Much of the Acropolis work is notable for its movement from shadow into light: shadow is the starting-point, an axis of conceptual correlation, and light is a kind of catharsis. In this way, a movement in physical space becomes a movement in mental space. For Nelly, the substantial is the other side of the insubstantial.
Nelly is a classical European photographer with avant-garde elements associated with the structural composition of her photographs - leading to the creation of a kind of "musee fantastique" of the images which she herself wished to preserve. She thus belongs by right to the Hellenic creative world and also to international Modernism. Above all, however, she belongs to the very special person called Nelly.
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Originally Posted by TisaAnne
Thank you so much for sharing!
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