Third Text, Vol.

23, Issue 2, March, 2009, 181194

On Greek Photography
Eurocentrism, Cultural Colonialism and the Construction of Mythic Classical Greece
Nikos Panayotopoulos

1 Coutts-Smith claimed that, when we speak of a worldwide high culture we are actually referring to a tradition a significant part of which is formed by the whole spectrum of the Fine Arts largely restricted to European cultural experience. In the broadest sense, what we regard generally as culture, and specifically as art, is the continually mutating endproduct of a process that is basically mythic in nature. That is to say, a process in which beliefs and assumptions gain substance and become validated. But the dynamics of culture do not only lead in this way towards the fluid identification of a collective identity within a society; they also tend towards the freezing of concepts supportive of the interests of a dominant minority within that society. Kenneth Coutts-Smith, Cultural Colonialism, Third Text, 16:1, Routledge, LondonNew York, 2002 [1978]. 2 See for example: Artemis Leontis, Ambivalent Greece, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 15:1, 1997, pp 12536; Victor

This article aims to establish the grounds for a postcolonial reading of both Greece and its representation. It attempts to take a deeper look at the framework in which the image of Greece is constructed, interpreted and finally represented by examining how Greek photography has evaluated and represented its domestic environment, and the degree to which such an operation has been determined or influenced by dominant Western culture. Kenneth Coutts-Smith introduced the term cultural colonialism to describe how all cultural production is actually determined and measured by the yardstick of the dominant Western civilisation and how European art attempted to appropriate the visual culture of the whole planet into its own self-conceived mainstream. The term cultural colonialism or cultural Westernisation of the globe is most relevant in the type of approach I adopt in this paper.1 In order to frame my topic of interest, I have taken into consideration the photographic work of Nelly. I employ a sociocultural analysis which is largely informed by post-colonial theory in the mode of the discussion, analysis and interpretation of these works. Visual images are produced in societal, institutional and discursive contexts. Overall, Nelly illustrates a good deal about the desired identity of the new state, an image of how Greeces new middle class desired both their country and themselves to appear, that is, how they sought to constitute their social, cultural and national identity.

GREEK NATIONAL IDENTITY: THE CONSTRUCTION OF A NATION

As most contemporary historians agree,2 the points of reference that contributed to the construction of Greek identity are Ancient Greece and
Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online Third Text (2009) http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09528820902840672

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The Great Excavation of Delphi: The Discovery of Antinous, unknown photographer, 1892-1893, silverprint, collection of Ecole Franaise dAthnes (EfA no C 304)

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Roudometof, From Millet to Greek Nation: Enlightenment, Secularisation and National Identity in Ottoman Balkan Society, 14531821, Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 16, 1998, pp 11 47; Nikos Inzessiloglou, EPI TH KATAKEYH YOIKN TAYTOTHTN, in EMEI KAI OI AOI: ANAOPA TI TAEI KAI TA YMBOA, eds Chr Konstantopoulou and L Maratou-Alipranti, EKKE, Athens, 2000. 3 Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998

4 Victor Roudometof, op cit, p 17 5 Ibid, p 23 6 Penelope Petsini, Greek Photography, Greek Singularities, in Photography and the Contemporary Greek Family, doctoral thesis, University of Derby, School of Art, Design and Technologies, 2004, p 100 7 Peter Osborne, Travelling Light: Photography, Travel and Visual Culture, Manchester University Press, ManchesterNew York, 2000, p 5 8 Martin Heidegger, The Age of the World Picture, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, Harper Torchbooks, Harper & Row, New York, 1977, pp 12830 9 As Osborne puts it: Throughout the nineteenth century the function of the photograph was strongly determined by its part in the process of unifying the geographical, economic, ideological and, indeed, imaginary territory across which capitalism was being extended. This process combined brute force with the logic of the market, and the efficacy of technology

the Byzantine Empire. The concepts of nation and national identity are relatively recent phenomena that emerged at the point of the shift from the authoritarian, theocratic ideology of the ancien rgime to that of the Enlightenment.3 In the Ottoman Balkans, the Orthodox Church was the key social institution: it functioned as the repository of the Balkan nations national identity during the Ottoman period.4 Thus, up to the eighteenth century, Greek national identity was of a largely religious nature. Moreover, as Victor Roudometof states, Greek was synonymous with Orthodoxy, and the Orthodox Balkan merchants and peddlers were referred to as Greeks because of their Orthodox religion.5 Ancient Greece did not appear much within this scheme. However, as Enlightenment ideas ideas that were at the forefront of the educational systems in the West began to spread in the Balkans, national identities started to be reconsidered. In Greece, intellectuals such as Adamantios Korais, for example, argued that modern Greeks needed to be enlightened, and urged them to become educated through modern Western knowledge in order to become worthy of bearing the glorious name of Hellenes. 6 Of course, he noted, Greeks should try to preserve continuity with the Orthodox philosophical tradition; however, this already implied a transformation of Greek religious identity into a secular one, and, indeed, this was one directly related to Ancient Hellas. In the construction of this new identity Europe played a decisive role a role that was directly connected and informed by the ideology of colonialism.
The Great Excavation of Delphi: The Discovery of Antinous , unknown photographer, 1892-1893, silverprint, collection of Ecole Franaise dAthnes (EfA no C 304)

EUROCENTRISM AND THE EMPHASIS ON ANCIENT HELLAS

As Peter Osborne argues, from the sixteenth century Europe witnessed an explosion of geography involving a multiplication of images such as maps, topographical pictures and the countless images in which Europe dreamed the strangeness of distant regions and their peoples and now additionally the strangeness of the world in general and the cold space above it.7 Out of its concern to measure, survey and navigate through the widening material world they sought to know and control, Europes unsettled and expansionist cultures came to rely on a knowledge gathered by optically based observational and measuring techniques. Through these mechanisms the world was becoming represented as a picture a framed visual display laid out for a spectator. Heidegger famously described this reconfiguring of the world through the human perspective as a founding act of modernity, an era he named the age of the world [as] picture.8 The goal of this extended project, however, was not only to collect the world but also to arrange it into European classifications. 9 In this world picture, the world was made to appear not simply visible but visually ordered, following particular intellectual, aesthetic and ideological rules. As Osborne remarks, long before disembarking, Europe travellers knew what had to be seen and how it was to be interpreted.10 The whole process is clearly implicated with colonialism:

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with the allure and cultural violence of representation. Modes of industrialised travel, communication and representation appeared with each other and as part of each other. Osborne, op cit, pp 1112. 10 Ibid, p 24 11 Ibid, p 18 12 F M Tsigakou, The Rediscovery of Greece, Travellers and Painters of the Romantic Era, Oxford University Press, London, 1981 13 Edward Said, Orientalism, Routledge, LondonNew York, 1978 14 C A Demoustier, Lettres a Emilie sur la mythologie, 1786; Abb Barthlemy, Voyage du Jeune Anacharsis en Grce, 1788

The selection of subject matter and the formation of visual styles would have been shaped by nineteenth-century viewers assumed ideological needs, their cultural competence and what they expected of photography Shaping all tastes and preconceptions concerning travel photography were the values and consequences of colonial expansion. All forms of travel, and therefore all travel photography outside the metropolitan centres, was in some way touched by colonialism.11

Interest in Greece and its ancient past was developed by Western intelligentsia of the Enlightenment with the revival of classical learning, that is, the translation of ancient Greek texts, their introduction into university curricula and so forth.12 As a result, a number of European visitors started coming to Greece with the desire to identify places related to the Homeric epics or to discover the Athens of the Golden Age of Pericles. Soon Greece became the signifier of mythical values, already a representation in itself, and, as had happened in Egypt,13 the Greek nation was re-created in terms of the European view of world history and arranged into a repertoire of items, themes and sites, upon which future writers, painters and travellers drew extensively. Early visitors produced textual and pictorial documentation of their journey to Greece promoting altogether a stereotyped perception of Greece focusing on antiquities and historical sites.14 Evidence of interest

Nelly (Elli Seraidari), Nikolska dancing at the Parthenon, 1929, silver bromide print, Benaki Museum, photographic archive, Athens (N 2101)

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in other subjects, such as the contemporary social scene or modern Greek architecture, is almost non-existent.15 Greece was less a contemporaneous political entity than a stone theatre of frozen time: its essence was defined as the ruin and the archaeological site. Such presentations of the country were entirely consonant with Europes colonising impulses. As Samir Amin points out, the dominant culture invented an eternal West, unique since the moment of its origin and largely based on its interpretation of Ancient Greek civilisation:
Nelly (Elli Seraidari), Nikolska dancing at the Parthenon , 1929, silver bromide print, Benaki Museum, photographic archive, Athens (N 2101)

The product of this Eurocentric vision is the well-known version of Western history a progression from Ancient Greece to Rome to feudal Christian Europe to capitalist Europe one of the most popular of received ideas The history of so-called Western thought and philosophy (which presupposes the existence of other, diametrically opposed thoughts and philosophies, which it calls Oriental) always begins with Ancient Greece.16

15 Aliki Tsirgialou, The Stereotyped Vision of Greece: 19th century photographs in the Benaki Museum Archives, Benaki Museum, Athens, 2005 16 Samir Amin, Eurocentrism, Zed Books, London, 1988, pp 8991 17 Alexandros PapageorgiouVenetas, APXITEKTONIKH HMIOYPIA THN AHNA, NEOI POMOI TOY KA IKIMOY, in ENA NEO KOMO ENNIETAI, H EIKONA TOY EHNIKOY OITIMOY TH EPMANIKH EITHMH KATA TON 19o AINA, ed Evaggelos Chryssos, Akritas Publications, Athens, 1996, p 278 18 Osborne, op cit, p 24. Acquaintance with the decline of ancient empires, claims Osborne, was of special importance to an imperialist Europe. Ruins inevitably carried a monitory weight, signifying, as Edward Said puts it, the fall from classical greatness, Edward Said, Orientalism, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1991, p 233. 19 Osborne, op cit, p 24 20 Roudometof, op cit, pp 2324

In a similar spirit, Alexandros Papageorgiou-Venetas remarks that the shine of ancient Greek ruins has been the initial source of radiance which inspired Europe and formed the motive in the development of the classicist approach to the world. The adoration of antiquity, as a main aesthetic-humanistic attitude of the West an attitude which ennobles life, is now imported in the resurrected country which constitutes the object of nostalgia of the West.17 To the nineteenth-century viewer this preponderance of ruins conveyed a number of meanings: emblems of lost times, they expressed modern societys desire to recover, in the cultures of other places and other epochs, the authenticity it imagines it has lost in its own. As Osborne puts it, the European desire to connect with lost authenticity had more to do with the necessity of establishing foundations and traditions which would legitimate Europes claims to moral and cultural superiority.18 In the similar case of Egypt, for example:
For the European elites the selective tracing of their cultural descent from certain adopted parent societies such as ancient Egypt, was the expression of this necessity. Their ability to uncover and interpret Egypts lost imperium gave Europeans possession of what they regarded as a greatness with which they might infuse their own. At the same time by restoring and decoding its fragments, by re-inventing Egypt, Europe had made itself both Egypts originator and its inheritor. More than this, European archaeology signified and proclaimed its capacity for disinterring truth itself.19

Ultimately, whatever sympathy or denigration the modern Greeks received from European travellers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, argues Roudometof, was invariably based on their affinities with or divergences from the ancient Greeks. Of course, the modern Greeks needed the guiding light of the West, which was now the repository of antiquitys legacy.20 It is this particular scheme that determined most aspects of Greece in the decades that followed.
Nelly (Elli Seraidari), collage presented at The World Fair, New York 1939, silver bromide print, Benaki Museum, photographic archive, Athens

THE AMBIVALENCE TOWARDS GREECE

Greece, as a significant historical topos, as well as a part of a particular geopolitical area where different cultures, religions and powers have

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Nelly (Elli Seraidari), collage presented at The World Fair, New York 1939, silver bromide print, Benaki Museum, photographic archive, Athens

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often met, coexisted or conflicted and still do, is or is held to be a continuously evolving stage of antinomies and dichotomies. This fact, however, obviously makes identity a very complex matter for Greeks. In addition, it produces contradictory definitions of Greece and its inhabitants internationally, which in turn contributes to making Greeks more nervous and insecure:
[Huntington] naming the civilisation east of the fault line Slavic Orthodox instead of simply Orthodox, apparently tried to account for Greece, the cradle of Western civilisation and a NATO and European Union member but the map that was supplied in the article had Greece on the wrong side of the fault line. Of course, it can be argued that exceptions prove the rule, but this did not reassure the Greeks, who reacted strongly against their implicit marginalisation.21

21 Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, Oxford University Press, London and Oxford, 1997, p 131 22 Walter Puchner, OI IEOOIKE BAEI TH EITHMONIKH ENAXOHH ME TON EHNIKO AKO OITIMO TON 19o AINA, in Evaggelos Chryssos, ed, op cit, p 267 23 Hans Eideneier, ANAZHTNTA THN EHNIKH HMOTIKH OIHH, in Evaggelos Chryssos, ed, op cit, p 227 24 Quoted in Leontis, op cit, p 125 25 Ibid 26 Ibid 27 Todorova, op cit, p 94

This ambivalence towards Greece occurs in parallel with the elaboration of a set of ideas about the weakness of the political and economic state of modern Greece, a commonplace in travel literature until today. The coexistence of the ancient and the modern Greece, as two projections on the same screen, creates a contradictory result that can be found in most travellers texts, from the earliest until the most recent. In most cases, the idealised preconceptions about ancient Hellas and Hellenes are in direct analogy to the underestimation or even contempt for modern Greece and Greeks respectively. Walter Puchner comments characteristically that people like Greeks face a significant difficulty: to formulate their present such as to be equal to their past.22 The Greek state ideology of the nineteenth century has been orientated to the reproduction of the past and this caused a continuous comparison, which was, and still is, oppressive to the modern Greek culture. Apart from that, philhellenism was mainly characterised by a romantic mood which was amputated, or at least distanced, from Greek reality. For instance, Hans Eideneier remarks, for the philhellenes, Greeks were living in the seas of Aeolos and into the cabins of Eumeous, near the shady springs of Kifissos or the dark currents of Alfios.23 Ren Chateaubriand, who represents a characteristic example of the Romantic Pilgrimage, on his travels to Greece in 1806 wrote:
Ive seen Greece! I visited Sparta, Argos, Mycenae, Corinth, Athens; beautiful names, alas! Nothing more the integrity of the ruined monuments had been violated by the intrusion of contemporary structures, which, like the Greek language, betrayed foreign languages Never see Greece, Monsieur, except in Homer. It is the best way.24

Almost three centuries later, in 1995, Paul Theroux wrote that in a land of preposterous myths, the myth of Greece as a paradise of joy and abundance was surely the most preposterous.25 Artemis Leontis comments: start with any of these or numerous other travellers accounts and the point is the same: Greece has an endless capacity to disappoint, to fall short of its reputation.26 As Maria Todorova argues, the interest in Greece was the product of classicism, the Grand Tour and strategic interests in the eastern Mediterranean, apprehensive first of France and later, mostly, of Russia: it was never, however, an interest in the Greeks per se.27 To recall Woodhouse:

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They loved the Greece of their dreams: the land, the language, the antiquities, but not the people. If only, they thought, the people could be more like the British scholars and gentlemen: or failing that, as too much to be hoped, if only they were more like their own ancestors: or better still, if only they were not there at all.28

28 C M Woodhouse, The Philhellenes, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1969, p 37 29 Ibid, p 130

Beneath the surface, this attitude has not simply informed travel literature with regard to Greece; it also contributed to the definition of what being a modern Greek signifies, in other words, it influenced and contributed to the formation of what was perceived as Greek identity. Favouring the glorious past over the discordant or diverse present, this account discards the heterogenous aspects and histories of modern Greece that constitute a substantial part of its very identity. What these accounts present as a real Greece is a preserve of unchanging, decidedly unmodern characteristics,29 a place inhabited by people whose racial kinship to their ancient ancestors is granted. From philhellenism and neo-classic romanticism to Fallmerayer, from the apotheosis of the Greek philosophers to the Black Athena, from Byron to Huntington, from the classicist aristocratic travellers to the bourgeois tourists, Greece and Greeks are facing a continuous change in the ways the rest of the world, especially the West (at first Europe, then the United States), perceives them. However, whenever such change occurs, it is mainly in aesthetic terms, a change of image. When, for
Nelly (Elli Seraidari), Parallels, 1930s, silver bromide prints: Left: Girl from Ipati, Greece, 1930s; Right: Head of a female Lapith from the scene of the Battle of Centaurs , Temple of Zeus, Olympia, 1930s, Benaki Museum, photographic archive, Athens (N 4171)

Nelly (Elli Seraidari), Parallels, 1930s, silver bromide prints: Left: Girl from Ipati, Greece, 1930s; Right: Head of a female Lapith from the scene of the Battle of Centaurs, Temple of Zeus, Olympia, 1930s, Benaki Museum, photographic archive, Athens (N 4171)

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example, aristocratic bias was gradually substituted by bourgeois rational culture during the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, it caused a shift in the Western perception of Greece, but the main axis of reference of this perception was left untouched. Todorova, referring to the ways in which the Europeans perceive the Balkans, lays her emphasis on the aesthetic side of this perception:
These patterns of perception were also shaped by what was increasingly becoming a common outlook of the educated European, sharing in the beliefs and prejudices of the intellectual currents and fashions dominant at different periods: renaissance values, humanism, empiricism, enlightenment ideas, classicism, romanticism, occasionally even socialism, but almost inevitably tainted with what Aijaz Ahmad has called the usual banalities of nineteenth-century Eurocentrism.30

THE CULTURAL HEGEMONY AND GREEK PHOTOGRAPHY

Western cultural hegemony produces and imposes a certain gaze, a Western gaze, whose apparently self-evident nature carefully conceals its historical and ideological constitution. This gaze is imported into Greece through a number of both overt and covert processes and media. Overtly through all systems of image production and distribution, such as photography, cinema, visual arts, television, comics, etc. and covertly through ideas, knowledge, technology, entertainment, lifestyles, fashion in general, values, services, etc. Its acceptance as a model gaze allows it to supplant the indigenous easily and stealthily. By controlling the perception of the dominated, it controls indigenous reality, attempting

30 Todorova, op cit, p 111

Nelly (Elli Seraidari), Nude Athlete at the Delphi Festival, 1930, glass plates, Benaki Museum, photographic archive, Athens (N 1819a)

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31 Seferis (George Seferiadis), a major Greek poet, was born 1900 in Smyrna. He studied law in Paris (1918 1924) and in 1926 he joined the diplomatic service. His career took him to London and Albania and in 1941 he left Athens with the Greek Government for Alexandria. After the war he served in Ankara, London and Beirut (ambassador 19551962). In 1963 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in 1971 in Athens when Greece was under a military dictatorship. Having denounced the regime in March 1969 he became an icon for the Greeks who hated the junta and loved his poetry. 32 Such a delay is a common process for the periphery in its dependence on metropolitan centres. The only difference is the degree and the form of the delay, which varies according to the distance that exists and also to the extent of resistance developed in particular cases between periphery and metropolis.

either to correct or to replace it. The entire landscape, social and natural, must conform to its own authentic view and order of the world. Wherever I go Greece wounds me, stated the poet George Seferis.31 This expression, overly familiar and overused, is shorthand for the cultured Greeks who, having been nurtured by the Western European spirit and gaze I have described, feel alienated from their own land. A conceptual cultural construct the desirable, ideal image of their country does not fit the image of the indigenous reality. Above all, it is the gaze that is wounded. Wherever they turn their gaze, wherever they go, the images that they seek are non-existent. On the contrary, other images, inferior, unsuitable for their gaze, annoying, indifferent or chaotic images, besiege it. This conflict between an imaginary projection and the real picture, an everlasting and evolving conflict, appears particularly dynamic and complex, creating a neurotic mutation of the modern Greek reality, which is by some perceived as a crisis, by others as decadence and by some others as modernisation. It is the gaze which is wounded by the Greek reality, exactly because it is that same gaze that attacks reality with the intention of correcting, transforming and adjusting it to its own perceived norms. A careful reading of Greek photography reveals that it was, and remains, an indefatigable and often enthusiastic instrument for the introduction of the two aforementioned systems: the Western gaze and the semantic framework of the photographic medium. A framework that is the total of principles, rules and tradition which appeared and evolved in the industrial West and illustrates the Eurocentric views of the world. Having been adopted as the natural and authentic system, it dominated the reproduction of the indigenous reality. And, by suggesting what was worth and what was not worth photographing, it simultaneously defined what was worth seeing and appreciating in that very same reality. This dissonance acquires a crucial magnitude and importance when photography enters the domain of art. Here, the relationship between artist and reality, as well as the relationship between the artists and their medium, is decisive. Even though at times they manage to harmonise their gaze with their own reality, Greek photographers use idiolects long since formulated in the West, idiolects already declining, out of fashion or even obsolete.32 With a gaze belonging to another place and another time, they are trying to negotiate a reality so much their own and at the same time so alien to them as far as the widest and, rather, the most essential part of it is concerned. Greek photographers since 1840 have been, consciously or unconsciously, ingeniously or crudely, adopting that perceptual-representational system. Since photography can illustrate everything, permeate and diffuse all social strata, become hyperactive, inexpensive, comprehensible, easily and massively reproducible, it nourished the Greek perception more than anything else, before it was forced to share that role within the task of Europeanisation or Westernisation/Modernisation with film and television. Arguably, all these operate under the ideal camouflage of a seemingly plausible depiction of reality. The illustrative and romanticising stereotypes of antiquity-worshipping European travellers concerning the exotic land of the Hellenes evolved from drawings, paintings and engravings into the photochemical
Nelly (Elli Seraidari), Nude Athlete at the Delphi Festival , 1930, glass plates, Benaki Museum, photographic archive, Athens (N 1819a)

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illustrations of the Western photographer-travellers. Thus, nineteenthcentury Greece was presented as a mythical Arcadia in sepia tones, a land with few and primitive natives but full of magnificent ancient temples and ruins. Greek photography absorbed them as models of photographic authority, quality and simultaneously as model aspects of the country. Since then, everything that was discovered by the original Western gaze as Greek either beautiful and picturesque or ugly was also discovered, with some delay, by the indigenous gaze, both as reality and as image. Nellys work, which I will discuss in the following section, exemplifies perfectly the above account, while, at the same time, illustrating a good deal about the desired image of the Hellenic ideal that informed the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

THE CASE OF NELLY

Nelly trained in photography in Dresden between 1920 and 1925 under Hugo Erfurth and Franz Fiedler, and arrived in Athens with a conservative photographic and aesthetic language (in terms of technique, style and ideology) which was accepted in Greece as modernity. Soon she became very popular, and her photographs are still the most published and presented. The basic properties of her work reflect a neo-classical aesthetic and ideology, an insistence on staged composition and a frequent pictorial manipulation of the photographic medium. The combination of such properties distinguished her from other significant Greek photographers (Papaioannou, Meletzis, Balafas and Tloupas) who negotiated the dramatic events of the period from 1930 to 196033 using a purer photographic language which expressed a different ideology. Moreover, one more revealing detail was the deliberate change of her name from, Elli SouyoutzoglouSeraidari, of Turkish origin, to the Latin Nelly, on which she insisted throughout her life. Nellys photographs of Nickolska (19251929) at the Parthenon are possibly the best known example of Greek photography internationally. Beyond its plastic quality this work has been recognised as representing the ancient Hellenic spirit, the harmony, the eroticism, the beauty, the grace and moves of the ancient maidens. However, the transparent veil, the pose, the naked body, are all illustrative and symbolic stereotypes of the West with regard to the Orient. They also refer to the use and availability of women as they have evolved throughout the centuries in Western iconography in conjunction with comparable pictorial stereotypes of Greek antiquity. The Parthenon as an alibi, displaced from its history, functions as a prestigious backdrop and Mary Wigmans philhellenes Valkyries are supposed to embody the ancient maidens of the East Mediterranean. The Greek photography historian Alkis Xanthakis claimed that Nellys uniqueness lies exactly within the fact that she did not copy imported aesthetic elements, but she managed to absorb them and adjust them to the Greek space.34 He confirms the interpretation of this gaze and its absorption. However, I feel that, on the contrary, it is the Greek space that adjusted to the idealised Western version. Being as we are the carriers of the Western gaze, Nellys portrayals would have struck us Greeks as
Nelly (Elli Seraidari), Study of Male Nude in the Acropolis , c 1927, glass plate, Benaki Museum, photographic archive, Athens (N 35 2b) Nelly (Elli Seraidari), Hoplites, Ftes Delphiques, 1930, glass plate, Benaki Museum, photographic archive, Athens (N 1829)

33 This period includes the fascist dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas (1936 1940); the war against Italy (194041); the German occupation and the Resistance (19411944); the British involvement after the liberation (1945 1946); the consequent Civil War and Greeces transition from Britains sphere of interest and control to that of the US (19451949); the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrines. 34 Alkis Xanthakis, History of Greek Photography: 18391960, Hellenic Library and Historical Archives Society, Athens, 1991

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Nelly (Elli Seraidari), Study of Male Nude in the Acropolis, c 1927, glass plate, Benaki Museum, photographic archive, Athens (N 35 2b)

poor and indifferent, had they been illustrations closer to the Greek reality. The West singles Nelly out of a crowd of equally noteworthy Greek photographers, since the images of Greece that she suggests coincide with the images that the West has already constructed for this country. Despite her Dresden training in photography, Nelly arrived in Athens with a curiously conservative photographic and aesthetic language which was accepted in Greece as modern. Despite her culture, proficiency in languages, perception, dynamism and continuous contact with Europe and Germany in particular, she seemed to ignore the great artistic movements and the corresponding photographic discoveries that

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Nelly (Elli Seraidari), Hoplites, Ftes Delphiques, 1930, glass plate, Benaki Museum, photographic archive, Athens (N 1829)

were sweeping Europe at that time (Bauhaus, New Objectivity, Dada, Surrealism, street photography, and others). Upon arriving in Greece in 1925, she brought along a photographic language, primarily of German origin. She introduced the bromoil method, a pictorial technique that made its appearance in the West during the period 19071917. This technique, old-fashioned even for that time, was mainly adopted by arty amateur and professional pictorialists, seeking to be admitted into the academic fine arts through a pictorial mutation of the photographic illustration. About the middle of the second decade, this hybrid was already fading away under the pressure of the artistic and social changes and the acceptance of pure photography as a self-sustaining art. The pictorial quality of the technique swept across Athenian society and Nelly used it for a long time. Spyros Melas, in his review of an exhibition in 1929, unwittingly revealed the contemporary peripheral outlook on art and the West, as well as the surrender of reality:
Through this method, the photographer takes a note of a simple canvas of the landscape, on which he [sic] has to reconstruct it with his brush. In that way, he enters the domain of painting, too Therefore, good modern photography made by artistic photographers becomes immensely better than a multitude of bad paintings Photography fades away almost entirely, the only thing that is left is the faint outline of objects, a sketch that has to be filled, to become a painting. The freedom of the artisan is not absolute, in contrast with the freedom of the artist

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before the canvas, it is nevertheless sufficient to reveal an artistic perception Through this excellent work, Greek photography is entering the realm of the best in Europe.35

This attitude faithfully expressed the prevailing views on art (mainly painting) and photography at the time. It is apparent that bromoil (the denial of photographic ability but also of reality) is the only opportunity afforded by this obsolete idealism to photography to touch upon the borderline separating the technician from the artist. That is where a great photographer can receive the highest of all distinctions in being better than a bad painter. Nevertheless, many years before, the West treated this technique as an arty pseudo-photographic tactic. About twenty years before Melas wrote his review, Bernard Shaw had said about bromoil that:
When the photographer takes to forgery, the press encourages him. The critics, being professional connoisseurs of the shiftiest of the old makeshifts, come to the galleries where the forgeries are exhibited. They find to their relief that here, instead of a new business for them to learn, is a row of monochromes which their old jargon fits like a glove. Forthwith they proclaim that photography has become an Art.36

35 Quoted in Xanthakis, op cit, p 180. 36 Quoted in Helmut and Alison Gernsheim, The History of Photography, From the Camera Obscura to the Beginning of the Modern Era, Thames & Hudson, London, 1969 [1955], p 464 37 Osborne, op cit, p 42

As with every gaze, Nellys is also a construction to which Western, in this case mainly German, ideology has made a significant contribution. Exhibiting an ideological and illustrational naivety, Nelly attempted to make a portraitists comparison of shepherds and village maidens to ancient Kuros and Kores in order to prove Greeks racial continuity. Since the visual similarity is apparent, therefore, racial continuity should be beyond doubt. The quest for Hellenic forms frequently tends to be a subconscious quest for Aryan features. It seems a quid pro quo profitable to both sides: the Germans are related to ancient Greeks and Greeks are related to modern Germans. Some of these images imply that Nelly may well have been familiar with Leni Riefenstahls portraits, though no such suggestion was made in Greece at the time. Nelly was herself something of a Riefenstahl director, adjusting Greece to the image that the West constructed for this country. Her patriotism, controlled by her idealistic gaze, prompts her into portraying our country in the way a philhellene traveller would. The philhellenes in both the West and in Greece contrived an ideological documentation of their idealised Greece, with Aryan features, unaltered for thousands of years, found in the melting pot of the Balkans and the Mediterranean. As a unified entity, Greece was not only the product of Western material interests but also the creation of the Western cultural imagination. Western Greece was composed through a process requiring a variety of mythologies and representations to which both photography and travel contributed. Osborne writes: In short, travel photographs functioned to educate viewers and would-be visitors how to see India and produced for them an India to see.37 To paraphrase Osborne, photographys visual structure mediated the visitors relationship to the sites in ways that ensured that these would be consumed aesthetically and interpreted ideologically. In short, travel photographs functioned to educate viewers and would-be visitors in how to see Greece and produced for them a Greece to see.