The year 2023 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary since the death of photographer Elly Sougioultzoglou-Seraidari (1899-1998), better known as Nelly’s. With a profound sense of responsibility towards her legacy, the Benaki Museum, to which she entrusted her valuable oeuvre in 1984, pays tribute to her with a retrospective exhibition which reintroduces the artist to today’s public. Her diverse work is arranged in three chapters corresponding to the three cities in which she shaped her photographic point-of-view: from her student years in Dresden in the early ’20s to her arrival in Athens, where she cut a dynamic figure within the city’s photographic world, and on to New York, where, in 1966, she finally retired after twenty-seven years of tireless work in the U.S.A.

The arrangement of her photographic oeuvre into groups illustrates the vast array of themes that triggered her lens during the forty-five years of her professional involvement with the medium. Well-known photographs from her numerous publications are complemented by new and heretofore unseen works, in an attempt to highlight the diverse aesthetic trends that she followed as well as the many techniques with which she experimented, both in black & white and colour. The exhibition is accompanied by magazines, posters and postcards, which help visitors understand the use of her photographic works in context, as well as rare cinematic footage and some of the photographic equipment that she used in Greece and the U.S.A.

The retrospective exhibition of Nelly’s work coincides with the fifty-year anniversary of the Benaki Museum Photographic Archives and is dedicated to the Department’s founder, Mrs Aimilia Geroulanou, and to the late Angelos Delivorrias, long-time Benaki Museum director.

Under the Patronage of H.E. the President of the Hellenic Republic Ms. Katerina Sakellaropoulou