Third Text, Vol. 23, Issue 2, March, 2009, 181–194

Third Text

ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online © Third Text (2009)http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals

DOI: 10.1080/09528820902840672

On Greek Photography

Eurocentrism, Cultural Colonialismand the Construction of Mythic

Classical Greece

Nikos Panayotopoulos

This article aims to establish the grounds for a

postcolonial

reading ofboth Greece and its representation. It attempts to take a deeper look atthe framework in which the image of Greece is constructed, inter-preted and finally represented by examining how Greek photographyhas evaluated and represented its domestic environment, and thedegree to which such an operation has been determined or influencedby dominant Western culture. Kenneth Coutts-Smith introduced theterm

cultural colonialism

to describe how all cultural production isactually determined and measured by the yardstick of the dominantWestern civilisation and how European art attempted to appropriatethe visual culture of the whole planet into its own self-conceived‘mainstream’. The term

cultural colonialism

or cultural

Westernisationof the globe

is most relevant in the type of approach I adopt in thispaper.

1

In order to frame my topic of interest, I have taken into considerationthe photographic work of Nelly. I employ a sociocultural analysis whichis largely informed by post-colonial theory in the mode of the discussion,analysis and interpretation of these works. Visual images are producedin societal, institutional and discursive contexts. Overall, Nelly illus-trates a good deal about the desired identity of the new state, an imageof how Greece’s new middle class desired both their country and them-selves to appear, that is, how they sought to constitute their social,cultural and national identity.

GREEK NATIONAL IDENTITY: THE CONSTRUCTIONOF A NATION

As most contemporary historians agree,

2

the points of reference thatcontributed to the construction of Greek identity are Ancient Greece and

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 end-product 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, London–New York, 2002 [1978].

2 See for example: Artemis Leontis, ‘Ambivalent Greece’,

Journal of Modern Greek Studies

, 15:1, 1997, pp 125–36; Victor

182

The Great Excavation of Delphi: The Discovery of Antinous, unknown photographer, 1892-1893, silverprint, collectionof Ecole Française d’Athènes (EfA no C 304)

183

the Byzantine Empire. The concepts of nation and national identity arerelatively recent phenomena that emerged at the point of the shift fromthe authoritarian, theocratic ideology of the

ancien régime

to that of theEnlightenment.

3

In the Ottoman Balkans, the Orthodox Church was thekey social institution: it functioned as ‘the repository of the Balkannations’ national identity during the Ottoman period’.

4

Thus, up to theeighteenth century, Greek national identity was of a largely religiousnature. Moreover, as Victor Roudometof states, ‘Greek’ was synony-mous with Orthodoxy, and the Orthodox Balkan merchants andpeddlers were referred to as ‘Greeks’ because of their Orthodox reli-gion.

5

Ancient Greece did not appear much within this scheme.

The Great Excavation of Delphi: The Discovery of Antinous

, unknown photographer, 1892-1893, silverprint, collection of Ecole Française d’Athènes (EfA no C 304)

However, as Enlightenment ideas – ideas that were at the forefrontof the educational systems in the West – began to spread in the Balkans,national identities started to be reconsidered. In Greece, intellectualssuch as Adamantios Korais, for example, argued that modern Greeksneeded to be ‘enlightened’, and urged them to become educated throughmodern Western knowledge in order to ‘become worthy of bearing theglorious name of Hellenes’.

6

Of course, he noted, Greeks should try topreserve continuity with the Orthodox philosophical tradition;however, this already implied a transformation of Greek religious iden-tity into a secular one, and, indeed, this was one directly related toAncient Hellas. In the construction of this new identity Europe played adecisive role – a role that was directly connected and informed by theideology of colonialism.

EUROCENTRISM AND THE EMPHASIS ON ANCIENT HELLAS

As Peter Osborne argues, from the sixteenth century Europe witnessedan ‘explosion of geography’ involving a ‘multiplication of images’ suchas maps, topographical pictures and ‘the countless images in whichEurope dreamed the strangeness of distant regions and their peoples andnow additionally the strangeness of the world in general and the coldspace above it’.

7

Out of its concern to measure, survey and navigate through thewidening material world they sought to know and control, Europe’sunsettled and expansionist cultures came to rely on a knowledge gath-ered by optically based observational and measuring techniques.Through these mechanisms the world was becoming represented as apicture – a framed visual display laid out for a spectator. Heideggerfamously described this reconfiguring of the world through the human

perspective

as a founding act of modernity, an era he named the ‘age ofthe world [as] picture’.

8

The goal of this extended ‘project’, however, was not only to collectthe world but also to arrange it into European classifications.

9

In this‘world picture’, the world was made to appear not simply visible butvisually ordered, following particular intellectual, aesthetic and ideologi-cal rules. As Osborne remarks, ‘long before disembarking, Europe trav-ellers knew what had to be seen and how it was to be interpreted’.

10

Thewhole process is clearly implicated with colonialism:

Roudometof, ‘From Millet to Greek Nation: Enlightenment, Secularisation and National Identity in Ottoman Balkan Society, 1453–1821’,

Journal of Modern Greek Studies

, 16, 1998, pp 11–47; Nikos Inzessiloglou, ‘

Π

EPI TH

Σ

KATA-

Σ

KEYH

Σ

Σ

Y

ΛΛ

O

Γ

IK

Ω

N TAYTOTHT

Ω

N’, in

EMEI

Σ

KAI OI A

ΛΛ

OI: ANA

Φ

OPA

Σ

TI

Σ

TA

Σ

EI

Σ

KAI TA

Σ

YMBO

Λ

A

, 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, Manchester–New 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 128–30

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

184

The selection of subject matter and the formation of visual styles wouldhave been shaped by nineteenth-century viewers’ assumed ideologicalneeds, their cultural competence and what they expected of photogra-phy… Shaping all tastes and preconceptions concerning travel photogra-phy were the values and consequences of colonial expansion. All forms oftravel, and therefore all travel photography outside the metropolitancentres, was in some way touched by colonialism.

11

Interest in Greece and its ancient past was developed by Western intelli-gentsia of the Enlightenment with the revival of classical learning, that is,the translation of ancient Greek texts, their introduction into universitycurricula and so forth.

12

As a result, a number of European visitorsstarted coming to Greece with the desire to identify places related to theHomeric epics or to discover the Athens of the Golden Age of Pericles.Soon Greece became the signifier of mythical values, already a represen-tation in itself, and, as had happened in Egypt,

13

the Greek nation wasre-created in terms of the European view of world history and arrangedinto a repertoire of items, themes and sites, upon which future writers,painters and travellers drew extensively.

Early visitors produced textual and pictorial documentation of theirjourney to Greece promoting altogether a stereotyped perception ofGreece focusing on antiquities and historical sites.

14

Evidence of interest

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 11–12.

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, London–New York, 1978

14 C A Demoustier,

Lettres a Emilie sur la mythologie

, 1786; Abbé Barthélemy,

Voyage du Jeune Anacharsis en Gréce

, 1788

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

185

in other subjects, such as the contemporary social scene or modernGreek architecture, is almost non-existent.

15

Greece was less a contem-poraneous political entity than a stone theatre of frozen time: its essencewas defined as the ruin and the archaeological site. Such presentations ofthe country were entirely consonant with Europe’s colonising impulses.

Nelly (Elli Seraidari),

Nikolska dancing at the Parthenon

, 1929, silver bromide print, © Benaki Museum, photographic archive, Athens (N 2101)

As Samir Amin points out, the dominant culture invented an ‘eternalWest’, unique since the moment of its origin and largely based on itsinterpretation of Ancient Greek civilisation:

The product of this Eurocentric vision is the well-known version of‘Western’ history – a progression from Ancient Greece to Rome to feudalChristian Europe to capitalist Europe – one of the most popular of receivedideas… The history of so-called Western thought and philosophy (whichpresupposes the existence of other, diametrically opposed thoughts andphilosophies, which it calls Oriental) always begins with Ancient Greece.

16

In a similar spirit, Alexandros Papageorgiou-Venetas remarks that theshine of ancient Greek ruins has been ‘the initial source of radiancewhich inspired Europe’ and formed the motive in the development of theclassicist approach to the world. ‘The adoration of antiquity, as a mainaesthetic-humanistic attitude of the West – an attitude which ennobleslife, is now imported in the resurrected country which constitutes theobject of nostalgia of the West.’

17

To the nineteenth-century viewer this preponderance of ruinsconveyed a number of meanings: emblems of lost times, they expressedmodern society’s desire to recover, in the cultures of other places andother epochs, the authenticity it imagines it has lost in its own. AsOsborne puts it, the European desire to connect with lost authenticity‘had more to do with the necessity of establishing foundations and tradi-tions which would legitimate Europe’s claims to moral and culturalsuperiority.’

18

In the similar case of Egypt, for example:

For the European elites the selective tracing of their cultural descent fromcertain adopted parent societies such as ancient Egypt, was the expressionof this necessity. Their ability to uncover and interpret Egypt’s lost

impe-rium

gave Europeans possession of what they regarded as a greatness withwhich they might infuse their own. At the same time by restoring anddecoding its fragments, by re-inventing Egypt, Europe had made itself bothEgypt’s originator and its inheritor. More than this, European archaeologysignified and proclaimed its capacity for disinterring truth itself.

19

Ultimately, whatever sympathy or denigration the modern Greeksreceived from European travellers of the eighteenth and nineteenthcenturies, argues Roudometof, was ‘invariably based on their affinitieswith or divergences from the ancient Greeks’. Of course, the modernGreeks needed ‘the guiding light of the West, which was now the reposi-tory of antiquity’s legacy’.

20

It is this particular scheme that determinedmost 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 particulargeopolitical area where different cultures, religions and powers have

15 Aliki Tsirgialou,

The Stereotyped Vision of Greece: 19

th

century photographs in the Benaki Museum Archives

, Benaki Museum, Athens, 2005

16 Samir Amin,

Eurocentrism

, Zed Books, London, 1988, pp 89–91

17 Alexandros Papageorgiou-Venetas, ‘APXITEKTONIKH

∆

HMIOYP

Γ

IA

Σ

THN A

Θ

HNA, NEOI

∆

POMOI TOY K

Λ

A

ΣΣ

IKI

Σ

MOY’, in

ENA

Σ

NEO

Σ

KO

Σ

MO

Σ

Γ

ENNIETAI, H EIKONA TOY E

ΛΛ

HNIKOY

Π

O

Λ

ITI

Σ

MOY

Σ

TH

Γ

EPMANIKH E

Π

I

Σ

THMH KATA TON 19o AI

Ω

NA

, 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 23–24

186

Nelly (Elli Seraidari), collage presented at ‘The World Fair’, New York 1939, silver bro-mide print, © Benaki Museum, photographic archive, Athens

187

often met, coexisted or conflicted and still do, is or is held to be a contin-uously 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 itsinhabitants internationally, which in turn contributes to making Greeksmore nervous and insecure:

[Huntington] naming the civilisation east of the fault line ‘Slavic–Orthodox’ instead of simply Orthodox, apparently tried to account forGreece, ‘the cradle of Western civilisation’ and a NATO and EuropeanUnion member… but the map that was supplied in the article… hadGreece on the wrong side of the fault line. Of course, it can be arguedthat exceptions prove the rule, but this did not reassure the Greeks, whoreacted strongly against their implicit marginalisation.

21

This ambivalence towards Greece occurs in parallel with the elaborationof a set of ideas about the weakness of the political and economic stateof modern Greece, a commonplace in travel literature until today. Thecoexistence of the ancient and the modern Greece, as two projections onthe same screen, creates a contradictory result that can be found in mosttravellers’ texts, from the earliest until the most recent. In most cases, theidealised preconceptions about ancient Hellas and Hellenes are in directanalogy to the underestimation or even contempt for modern Greece andGreeks respectively. Walter Puchner comments characteristically thatpeople like Greeks face a significant difficulty: ‘to formulate their presentsuch as to be equal to their past’.

22

The Greek state ideology of the nine-teenth century has been orientated to the reproduction of the past andthis caused a continuous comparison, which was, and still is, oppressiveto the modern Greek culture.

Apart from that, philhellenism was mainly characterised by a roman-tic mood which was amputated, or at least distanced, from Greek reality.For instance, Hans Eideneier remarks, for the philhellenes, Greeks wereliving ‘in the seas of Aeolos and into the cabins of Eumeous, near theshady springs of Kifissos or the dark currents of Alfios’.

23

René Chateaubriand, who represents a characteristic example of the‘Romantic Pilgrimage’, on his travels to Greece in 1806 wrote:

I’ve seen Greece! I visited Sparta, Argos, Mycenae, Corinth, Athens;beautiful names, alas! Nothing more… the integrity of the ruined monu-ments had been violated by the intrusion of contemporary structures,which, like the Greek language, betrayed foreign languages… Never seeGreece, Monsieur, except in Homer. It is the best way.

24

Almost three centuries later, in 1995, Paul Theroux wrote that ‘in a landof preposterous myths, the myth of Greece as a paradise of joy andabundance was surely the most preposterous’.

25

Artemis Leontiscomments: ‘start with any of these or numerous other travellers’accounts and the point is the same: Greece has an endless capacity todisappoint, to fall short of its reputation’.

26

As Maria Todorova argues,the interest in Greece was the product of classicism, the Grand Tour andstrategic interests in the eastern Mediterranean, apprehensive first ofFrance and later, mostly, of Russia: ‘it was never, however, an interest inthe Greeks per se’.

27

To recall Woodhouse:

21 Maria Todorova,

Imagining the Balkans

, Oxford University Press, London and Oxford, 1997, p 131

22 Walter Puchner, ‘OI I

∆

EO

Λ

O

Γ

IKE

Σ

BA

Σ

EI

Σ

TH

Σ

E

Π

I

Σ

THMONIKH

Σ

ENA

Σ

XO

Λ

HΣHΣ ME TON EΛΛHNIKO ΛAÏKO ΠOΛITIΣMO TON 19o AIΩNA’, in Evaggelos Chryssos, ed, op cit, p 267

23 Hans Eideneier, ‘ANAZHTΩNTAΣ THN EΛΛHNIKH ∆HMOTIKH ΠOIHΣH’, 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

188

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

Beneath the surface, this attitude has not simply informed travel liter-ature with regard to Greece; it also contributed to the definition of whatbeing a modern Greek signifies, in other words, it influenced andcontributed to the formation of what was perceived as Greek identity.Favouring the glorious past over the discordant or diverse present, thisaccount discards the heterogenous aspects and histories of modernGreece that constitute a substantial part of its very identity. What theseaccounts present as a ‘real’ Greece is a ‘preserve of unchanging, decid-edly unmodern characteristics’,29 a place inhabited by people whoseracial kinship to their ancient ancestors is granted.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)From philhellenism and neo-classic romanticism to Fallmerayer, fromthe apotheosis of the Greek philosophers to the ‘Black Athena’, fromByron to Huntington, from the classicist aristocratic travellers to thebourgeois tourists, Greece and Greeks are facing a continuous change inthe ways the rest of the world, especially the West (at first Europe, thenthe United States), perceives them. However, whenever such changeoccurs, it is mainly in aesthetic terms, a change of image. When, for

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

29 Ibid, p 130

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

189

example, aristocratic bias was gradually substituted by bourgeois ratio-nal culture during the second half of the nineteenth century and thebeginning of the twentieth, it caused a shift in the Western perception ofGreece, but the main axis of reference of this perception was leftuntouched.

Todorova, referring to the ways in which the Europeans perceive theBalkans, lays her emphasis on the aesthetic side of this perception:

These patterns of perception were also shaped by what was increasinglybecoming a common outlook of the educated European, sharing in thebeliefs and prejudices of the intellectual currents and fashions dominantat different periods: renaissance values, humanism, empiricism, enlight-enment ideas, classicism, romanticism, occasionally even socialism, butalmost inevitably tainted with what Aijaz Ahmad has called ‘the usualbanalities of nineteenth-century Eurocentrism’.30

THE CULTURAL HEGEMONY AND GREEK PHOTOGRAPHY

Western cultural hegemony produces and imposes a certain gaze, aWestern gaze, whose apparently self-evident nature carefully conceals itshistorical and ideological constitution. This gaze is imported into Greecethrough a number of both overt and covert processes and media. Overtlythrough all systems of image production and distribution, such asphotography, cinema, visual arts, television, comics, etc. and covertlythrough ideas, knowledge, technology, entertainment, lifestyles, fashionin general, values, services, etc. Its acceptance as a model gaze allows itto supplant the indigenous easily and stealthily. By controlling theperception of the dominated, it controls indigenous reality, attempting30 Todorova, op cit, p 111

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

190

either to ‘correct’ or to replace it. The entire landscape, social and natu-ral, must conform to its own ‘authentic’ view and order of the world.Nelly (Elli Seraidari), Nude Athlete at the Delphi Festival , 1930, glass plates, © Benaki Museum, photographic archive, Athens (N 1819a)‘Wherever I go Greece wounds me’, stated the poet George Seferis.31

This expression, overly familiar and overused, is shorthand for thecultured Greeks who, having been nurtured by the Western Europeanspirit and gaze I have described, feel alienated from their own land. Aconceptual cultural construct – the desirable, ideal image of their coun-try – does not fit the image of the indigenous reality. Above all, it is thegaze that is wounded. Wherever they turn their gaze, wherever they go,the images that they seek are non-existent. On the contrary, otherimages, inferior, unsuitable for their gaze, annoying, indifferent orchaotic images, besiege it. This conflict between an imaginary projectionand the real picture, an everlasting and evolving conflict, appears partic-ularly dynamic and complex, creating a neurotic mutation of the modernGreek reality, which is by some perceived as a crisis, by others as deca-dence and by some others as modernisation. It is the ‘gaze’ which is‘wounded’ by the Greek reality, exactly because it is that same gaze thatattacks reality with the intention of correcting, transforming and adjust-ing it to its own perceived norms.

A careful reading of Greek photography reveals that it was, andremains, an indefatigable and often enthusiastic instrument for the intro-duction of the two aforementioned systems: the Western gaze and thesemantic framework of the photographic medium. A framework that isthe total of principles, rules and tradition which appeared and evolved inthe industrial West and illustrates the Eurocentric views of the world.Having been adopted as the ‘natural’ and ‘authentic’ system, it domi-nated the reproduction of the indigenous reality. And, by suggestingwhat was worth and what was not worth photographing, it simulta-neously defined what was worth seeing and appreciating in that verysame reality.

This dissonance acquires a crucial magnitude and importance whenphotography enters the domain of art. Here, the relationship betweenartist and reality, as well as the relationship between the artists and theirmedium, is decisive. Even though at times they manage to harmonisetheir gaze with their own reality, Greek photographers use idiolects longsince formulated in the West, idiolects already declining, out of fashionor even obsolete.32 With a gaze belonging to another place and anothertime, they are trying to negotiate a reality so much their own and at thesame time so alien to them as far as the widest and, rather, the mostessential part of it is concerned.

Greek photographers since 1840 have been, consciously or uncon-sciously, ingeniously or crudely, adopting that perceptual-representa-tional system. Since photography can illustrate everything, permeate anddiffuse all social strata, become hyperactive, inexpensive, comprehensi-ble, easily and massively reproducible, it ‘nourished’ the Greek percep-tion more than anything else, before it was forced to share that rolewithin the task of Europeanisation or Westernisation/Modernisationwith film and television. Arguably, all these operate under the idealcamouflage of a seemingly plausible depiction of reality.

The illustrative and romanticising stereotypes of antiquity-worship-ping European travellers concerning the exotic land of the Hellenesevolved from drawings, paintings and engravings into the photochemical

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 1955–1962). 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.

191

illustrations of the Western photographer-travellers. Thus, nineteenth-century Greece was presented as a mythical Arcadia in sepia tones, a landwith few and primitive natives but full of magnificent ancient temples andruins. Greek photography absorbed them as models of photographicauthority, quality and simultaneously as model aspects of the country.Since then, everything that was ‘discovered’ by the original Western gazeas Greek – either beautiful and picturesque or ugly – was also ‘discovered’,with some delay, by the indigenous gaze, both as reality and as image.

Nelly’s work, which I will discuss in the following section, exempli-fies perfectly the above account, while, at the same time, illustrating agood deal about the desired image of the Hellenic ideal that informed thenineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

THE CASE OF NELLY

Nelly trained in photography in Dresden between 1920 and 1925 underHugo Erfurth and Franz Fiedler, and arrived in Athens with a conserva-tive photographic and aesthetic language (in terms of technique, styleand ideology) which was accepted in Greece as modernity. Soon shebecame very popular, and her photographs are still the most publishedand presented.Nelly (Elli Seraidari), Study of Male Nude in the Acropolis , c 1927, glass plate, © Benaki Museum, photographic archive, Athens (N 35 2b)The basic properties of her work reflect a neo-classical aesthetic andideology, an insistence on staged composition and a frequent pictorialmanipulation of the photographic medium. The combination of suchproperties distinguished her from other significant Greek photographers(Papaioannou, Meletzis, Balafas and Tloupas) who negotiated thedramatic events of the period from 1930 to 196033 using a ‘purer’ photo-graphic language which expressed a different ideology. Moreover, onemore revealing detail was the deliberate change of her name from, ‘ElliSouyoutzoglou–Seraidari’, of Turkish origin, to the Latin ‘Nelly’, onwhich she insisted throughout her life.

Nelly’s photographs of Nickolska (1925–1929) at the Parthenon arepossibly the best known example of Greek photography internationally.Beyond its plastic quality this work has been recognised as representingthe ancient Hellenic spirit, the harmony, the eroticism, the beauty, thegrace and moves of the ancient maidens. However, the transparent veil,the pose, the naked body, are all illustrative and symbolic stereotypes ofthe West with regard to the Orient. They also refer to the use and ‘avail-ability’ of women as they have evolved throughout the centuries inWestern iconography in conjunction with comparable pictorial stereo-types of Greek antiquity. The Parthenon as an alibi, displaced from itshistory, functions as a prestigious backdrop and Mary Wigman’s phil-hellenes Valkyries are supposed to embody the ancient maidens of theEast Mediterranean.Nelly (Elli Seraidari), Hoplites, Fétes Delphiques , 1930, glass plate, © Benaki Museum, photographic archive, Athens (N 1829)The Greek photography historian Alkis Xanthakis claimed that Nelly’suniqueness ‘lies exactly within the fact that she did not copy importedaesthetic elements, but she managed to absorb them and adjust them tothe Greek space’.34 He confirms the interpretation of this gaze and itsabsorption. However, I feel that, on the contrary, it is the Greek spacethat adjusted to the idealised Western version. Being as we are the carriersof the Western gaze, Nelly’s portrayals would have struck us Greeks as

33 This period includes the fascist dictatorship of Ioannis Metaxas (1936–1940); the war against Italy (1940–41); the German occupation and the Resistance (1941–1944); the British involvement after the liberation (1945–1946); the consequent Civil War and Greece’s transition from Britain’s sphere of interest and control to that of the US (1945–1949); the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrines.

34 Alkis Xanthakis, History of Greek Photography: 1839–1960, Hellenic Library and Historical Archives Society, Athens, 1991

192

poor and indifferent, had they been illustrations closer to the Greek real-ity. The West singles Nelly out of a crowd of equally noteworthy Greekphotographers, since the images of Greece that she suggests coincide withthe images that the West has already constructed for this country.

Despite her Dresden training in photography, Nelly arrived in Athenswith a curiously conservative photographic and aesthetic languagewhich was accepted in Greece as modern. Despite her culture, profi-ciency in languages, perception, dynamism and continuous contact withEurope and Germany in particular, she seemed to ignore the great artis-tic movements and the corresponding photographic discoveries that

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

193

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 photographiclanguage, primarily of German origin. She introduced the bromoilmethod, a pictorial technique that made its appearance in the Westduring the period 1907–1917. This technique, old-fashioned even forthat time, was mainly adopted by ‘arty’ amateur and professional ‘picto-rialists’, seeking to be admitted into the academic fine arts through apictorial mutation of the photographic illustration. About the middle ofthe second decade, this hybrid was already fading away under the pres-sure of the artistic and social changes and the acceptance of ‘pure’photography as a self-sustaining art. The pictorial quality of the tech-nique swept across Athenian society and Nelly used it for a long time.

Spyros Melas, in his review of an exhibition in 1929, unwittinglyrevealed the contemporary peripheral outlook on art and the West, aswell as the surrender of reality:

Through this method, the photographer takes a note of a simple canvasof the landscape, on which he [sic] has to reconstruct it with his brush. Inthat way, he enters the domain of painting, too… Therefore, goodmodern photography made by artistic photographers becomes immenselybetter than a multitude of bad paintings… Photography fades awayalmost entirely, the only thing that is left is the faint outline of objects, asketch … that has to be filled, to become a painting…. The freedom ofthe artisan is not absolute, in contrast with the freedom of the artist

Nelly (Elli Seraidari), Hoplites, Fétes Delphiques, 1930, glass plate, © Benaki Museum, photographic archive, Athens (N1829)

194

before the canvas, it is nevertheless sufficient to reveal an artistic percep-tion… Through this excellent work, Greek photography is entering therealm of the best in Europe.35

This attitude faithfully expressed the prevailing views on art (mainlypainting) and photography at the time. It is apparent that bromoil (thedenial of photographic ability but also of reality) is the only opportunityafforded by this obsolete idealism to photography to touch upon theborderline separating the ‘technician’ from the ‘artist’. That is where agreat photographer can receive the highest of all distinctions – in beingbetter than a bad painter. Nevertheless, many years before, the Westtreated this technique as an ‘arty’ pseudo-photographic tactic. Abouttwenty years before Melas wrote his review, Bernard Shaw had saidabout bromoil that:

When the photographer takes to forgery, the press encourages him. Thecritics, being professional connoisseurs of the shiftiest of the old make-shifts, come to the galleries where the forgeries are exhibited. They findto their relief that here, instead of a new business for them to learn, is arow of monochromes which their old jargon fits like a glove. Forthwiththey proclaim that photography has become an Art.36

As with every gaze, Nelly’s is also a construction to which Western, inthis case mainly German, ideology has made a significant contribution.Exhibiting an ideological and illustrational naivety, Nelly attempted tomake a portraitist’s comparison of shepherds and village maidens toancient Kuros and Kores in order to prove Greeks’ racial continuity.Since the visual similarity is apparent, therefore, racial continuity shouldbe beyond doubt. The quest for Hellenic forms frequently tends to be asubconscious quest for ‘Aryan’ features. It seems a quid pro quo profit-able to both sides: the Germans are related to ancient Greeks and Greeksare related to modern Germans. Some of these images imply that Nellymay well have been familiar with Leni Riefenstahl’s portraits, though nosuch suggestion was made in Greece at the time.Nelly was herself something of a Riefenstahl director, adjusting Greeceto the image that the West constructed for this country. Her patriotism,controlled by her idealistic gaze, prompts her into portraying our coun-try in the way a philhellene traveller would. The philhellenes in both theWest and in Greece contrived an ideological documentation of theiridealised Greece, with Aryan features, unaltered for thousands of years,found in the melting pot of the Balkans and the Mediterranean. As aunified entity, Greece was not only the product of Western materialinterests but also the creation of the Western cultural imagination.‘Western’ Greece was composed through a process requiring a variety ofmythologies and representations to which both photography and travelcontributed. Osborne writes: ‘In short, travel photographs functioned toeducate viewers and would-be visitors how to see India and produced forthem an India to see.’37 To paraphrase Osborne, photography’s visualstructure mediated the visitors’ relationship to the sites in ways thatensured that these would be consumed aesthetically and interpretedideologically. In short, travel photographs functioned to educate viewersand would-be visitors in how to see Greece and produced for them aGreece to see.

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