Photographs of Nelly (1899 – 1998), Greek photographer and the first artist to photograph a nude dancer on the Acropolis, were banned by Facebook, according to Greekreporter.com.
Nelly’s photographs of ancient Greek temples set against sea and sky backgrounds helped shape the visual image of Greece in the Western mind. She was also the first photographer in Greece to publish a color photograph and created the Greek Tourism Organization’s first-ever promotional poster. However, Nelly’s avant-garde pictures of nude Mona Paeva on the Parthenon were published in the French magazine Illustration de Paris and caused a scandal in Athens at that time.
Decades later the nude photos on the Acropolis continue to cause controversy. In 2017 Facebook decided that one of her emblematic photos on the Acropolis was inappropriate, and banned it. The victim of this surreal censorship was the Hellenic Museum of Melbourne which posted the photo to advertise an exhibition of her works. Her classical education and admiration of Ancient Greek civilization contributed to her photographic work at the Acropolis in a way that the latter has become decisive for the artist and also for the history of photography and architecture.
During the shoot in 1927, Nelly relates that she was so enchanted by the beauty of the dancer’s body in the Greek light that she asked Paeva if she could photograph her in the nude, and the dancer consented.
Once published, the Greek press condemned the images, which described them as “provocative profanity on the sacred monument.” In response to this backlash, writer Pavlos Nirvanas published an open letter in the “Elefthero Vima” newspaper, reminding the public that to ancient Greeks, the naked body represented the supreme expression of truth and was the embodiment of the classical ideal.
In her portraits Nelly uses artificial light, leaving one part of the form in the dark, while the background remains empty, as a reference to the Great Masters of the Renaissance.
This work aimed to search for the spiritual element, the poetic atmosphere and the demonstration of the form’s most profound essence.
During World War II, she went to the United States, where she stayed for 27 years and The Metropolitan Museum of New York bought a large series of her Acropolis photographs.
