Nita Harvey was imaginative, radiant and driven.
Before this Cultural Exchanges Festival I knew
nothing of Nita - nor of her great-niece Ellen Nolan ,
but that's another name I won't forget. Throughout this capsule collection we
were not only spectators to a celebration of family history, but were presented
with insightful narratives from both Ellen and Nita. Nita's contsant companion
was the camera as we followed her adventure from the back gardens in suburban
Golders Green to the rooftops of London theatreland on St Martin's Lane.
Nita's archive, curated by Ellen, is more than just
photographs; it's a memoir of a woman finding her self-portrait, a relationship
with the lens, an evolution of experimentation to expectation. It makes the
viewer witness to the development of playfulness and theatricality to awareness
and femininity of a young actress of the 1920s. Then comes a transition to
brutal objectification in Hollywood depicted through a 360-degree silent video
scanning her body - and the sense of playfulness is lost. But Nita's friednship
with the camera persists and remains true until the end.
'She is still beautiful'
I left that lecture theatre inspired by Ellen, who
took seven years to understand what she needed to do with the archive,
maintaining control by funding her own work. Ellen and Nita make me want to
produce my own project, influenced by Nita’s artistic flare and the emotions
she evokes even as she poses for her early photographs with domestic objects
such as pillows, piano stools, beads and bedsheets. Ellen's Instagram is flooded with ideas she's experimenting with, including
elements from the archive.
s.m.blair
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