From the Studio to the Street: Re-interpreting Nelly’s Documentary Practice

Active as a photographer for over 40 years, in Dresden, Athens, and New York, Elli Sougioultzoglou-Seraidari (a.k.a. Nelly’s, 1899-1998) has been a prominent figure in the history of Greek Photography since her early-twentieth-century work gained renewed curatorial and critical attention in the 1980s. However, the turn her career took during her self-imposed exile in New York during and after WWII had for years been under-researched and largely uncharted. As the number of professional women photographers doubled in North America to 10,000 during wartime, their work gained recognition through state commissions, publications, museum exhibitions, and the booming illustrated press. Although “the Grand Lady of Greek Photography” had received notable critical acclaim for her early exhibitions and displays of Greek subjects in institutions across the country, financial pressures and the anguish of settlement forced her to concentrate her photographic energies on establishing a sustainable studio practice. Based on unpublished photographic and archival materials, including personal and family correspondence, and newly found contact sheets of her street photography that were considered lost since 1991, this paper seeks to re-write the story of Nelly’s involvement with documentary photography in post-war North America. By recontextualising the 1956 series Easter Parade and Constructions and Buildings in New York in the visual cultures of New York, and against the post-war practice of émigré women photographers and their male counterparts, this research challenges preconceived ideas about Nelly’s aesthetic and ideological positioning, resituating her practice against aesthetic trends of the period, gender stereotypes of metropolitan women as well as considerations of class and race against a turbulent political backdrop and civil unrest. The paper also illuminates from a female perspective the operations of Alexey Brodovitch’s male-dominated photography workshop that Nelly attended, and which was instrumental in shaping the snapshot vision and storytelling methodologies of the New York School of Photography.