Elli Souyioultzoglou-Seraïdari (Greek: Έλλη Σουγιουλτζόγλου-Σεραϊδάρη) b.1899 - d.1998 (better known as Nelly's) is one the most celebrated Greek photographers of all time, and during the interwar period became one of the world's most celebrated female photographers. Her pictures of ancient Greek temples against sea and sky backgrounds, which were published by the first Greek ministries of tourism, shaped the first visual images of Greece in the Western mind.
She was born in Aidini, near Smyrna (now İzmir), Asia Minor, and after the 1922 expulsion of the ethnic Greeks of Asia Minor by the Turks following the Greco-Turkish war (1919-1922), she went to study photography in Germany under Hugo Erfurth and Franz Fiedler. In 1924 she came to Greece, where she adopted a nationalistic and conservative approach to her work.
At some point she was referred to as "the Greek Leni Riefenstahl" because of her collaboration with the 4th of August Regime (1936-1941), of which she was one of its most prolific photographers. As a Greek of the Diaspora, Nelly's view of Greece tended to be somewhat "idyllic", which matched the propaganda aims of the quasi-fascist regime, led by General Ioannis Metaxas. In fact, her work helped illustrating the idea of the racial continuity of the Greeks since Antiquity, which was within Metaxas' agenda.
In 1936 she photographed the Berlin Olympic Games, where she met Leni Riefenstahl, and accompanied her to Olympia. In 1939 she was commissioned the decoration of the interior of the Greek pavilion at the New York's World Fair, which she did with gigantic collages expressing the physical similarities between ancient and modern Greeks.
After the Greek defeat to the German Army in 1941 and the consequent end of the 4th of August regime, she left Greece for the United States, where she developed her talent in new disciplines such as advertising photography, photo-reportages. In the US she maintained links with powerful Greeks including shipowners Stavros Niarchos and Aristotle Onassis and developed contacts with the White House.
In 1985, Nelly's donated her photo archives and cameras to the Benaki Museum in Athens, while in 1987 she was presented with an honorary diploma and medal by the Hellenic Centre of Photography and the government. In 1993, she was awarded the Order of the Phoenix by the president of the Greek Republic. In 1996, the Athens Academy presented her with its Arts and Letters Award.
Nelly's died in Athens, Greece, on August 18, 1998.