The second life of Elli Souyoultsoglu-Seraydari from Nelli began with a note on Telephos of the K company almost 50 years ago. It was called “Small Orders” and looked for “traces of the old famous photographer Mr. Nellis”. The note was written by Rena Agguridou, one of the three editors of the Notebook column, which was compiled daily by journalists Rena Agguridou, Maria Karavia, Eleni Bistika and personally checked by Eleni Vlahou.

“He immediately called the newspaper, and I accidentally answered,” Maria Karavia recalls in our conversation. “She had a soft, slightly childish voice, and she said:“ I’m Nellie. It was in the winter of 1975. A daring photographer of interwar Athens, originally from Aidini and well educated in Dresden, who determined the photographic events of the city with his dynamic presence, lived in his family home in Nea Smyrni with her husband Angelos Seraydari. “A gentle, loving couple,” says Ms Karavia. Nellie was now 76 years old, and already in 1966, when they returned from New York to settle permanently in Greece, she stopped photographing. Perhaps no one remembered her, except for the director of “K”, who with a sudden insight asked the three editors: “This photographer Nelly, did anyone hear what happened?” Nobody heard anything. “Let’s write a couple of words, something like a search,” he asked.

“Eleni Vlahou always had her old Leica ready in the first drawer of her office,” writes Maria Karavia in the preface to the Benaki Museum edition of Nelly, which accompanies the eponymous retrospective of the creator of Asia Minor. A passionate photographer herself, she took part in the New York International Exhibition in 1939, with an impressive view of the Parthenon that was even noted. For the sake of this exhibition with the optimistic title “The World of Tomorrow” Nelly and her husband went to America, having received a residence permit for 23 days. The Greek pavilion was the work of a student of Dimitris Pikionis, Alexandra Moretis, while Nelly created part of the decor with artist Gerasimos Steris. Greek artists participated – visual artists such as Parthenis, Engonopoulos, Zongolopoulos and photographers including Voula Papaioannou. Nelly’s participated with five works from the series of black and white collages “Parallels” and received one of the first awards for a composition on the theme of Santorini.

With this money, he bought new photographic equipment. The hugely successful exhibition ended, but the photographer, with the support of the Greek community, organized a series of presentations of his work and lectures at the same time. After leaving Athens, she temporarily handed over the work of her atelier at 18 Ermou Street to her brother. Soon the Second World War was declared. The stay in the USA has been extended. After all, the absence in Greece lasted 27 years. In New York, she opened a new studio, they tried to settle in, she struggled to make a living with her husband, they faced financial difficulties, but always anxious, she tried color photography and learned new photographic trends. When she returned home in 1966, she was unknown to the Greek public. But, as she herself wrote in her Self-Portrait, “I also showed no signs of life.” Until Maria Caravia rang the doorbell of her house.

“I still remember that winter day,” Ms. Karavia says. “Her husband opened up to me, and I seemed to be in another era. Dim lighting, teak furniture I’ve seen for years, beautiful carpets and pottery. She was a small and smiling lady of middle age with a well-groomed appearance. The characteristic bob kept her hair from falling over her face. He greeted me standing in the back of the living room.” In the course of the discussion, this quiet woman was gradually revealed to be an artist whose images entered international history, one who, with her innovative vision, changed the aesthetics and technique of Greek photography in the 1920s and 1930s.

“She spoke simply, without exaggeration and without nostalgia for her former life,” journalist Maria Karavia says of their first meeting.

“She spoke simply, without exaggeration and without nostalgia for a past life,” recalls Ms Karavia. There were no photographs in Nea Smirni’s apartment. He asked her to show some of her historical images—portraits depicting the faces of Athenian city dwellers in the interwar period, the neighborhoods of old Athens she walked around with the historian Dimitrios Kamburoglou, the Delphic festivals she photographed solely through the intercession of Penelope. Delta. Rejected. “My man will have to go up to the attic,” she said, but even there was not much, she commented.

As Ms. Caravia later learned, the years of war, occupation and civil war ruined many of Nelli’s brilliant career. After the war, a box of photographs of her from various parts of Greece was loaded onto a ship bound for America. The ship stopped in Canada, the box was opened and some of its contents were gone. “As if that wasn’t enough, the downpour that hit Attica also destroyed part of the Ermou photography studio archive. Water got in, the negatives got wet, they changed,” Nelly told the journalist. “I still haven’t found the courage to clean up what’s left of this file,” he added. “But he always ended up optimistic: ‘I think I still have thousands of negatives in the attic,'” Ms Karavia recalls.

The article, the first in a series that followed their becoming friends, was published in K on November 30, 1975. It was called If Pictures Could Talk. The follow-up, titled “The Scandal at the Parthenon 48 Years Ago,” spoke of a series of photographs of nudes and dancing against the backdrop of the Acropolis, presented in Athens between 1925 and 1930. “On this occasion, newspapers and periodicals so that the Athenians remember her again,” Nelli wrote in her Self-Portrait.

Thus began a series of publications in the press, television broadcasts, presentations of her work in Greece and abroad, photo publications. The post-colonial Greek public rediscovered and accepted her work, and the state awarded her for her contribution to the artistic life of the country. Until her death in 1998, she was widely discussed and loved, and the fame of her work contributed to a wider interest in the history of Greek photography. In 1984, she donated all of her work to the Benaki Museum Photo Archive.

A few days ago, the Benaki Museum / Piraeus 138 opened a retrospective exhibition called “At Nelli’s”. Complete, tasteful and well-documented, edited by Alikis Tsirgialou, in charge of the Museum’s Photographic Archive, is the best way to reconnect the creator with the contemporary public, and coincides with the Photoarchive’s fifty years of work. The exhibition “At Nelli’s” and the publication of the same name are dedicated to Emilia Gerulan and the late Angelos Delivorrias. Duration until 23.07.