From home to Hollywood

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

A Trip into Nita's Archive

If Nita Harvey was alive today, I reckon we’d have got on well.

The warmth Ellen Nolan (her great niece) talks of her with is infectious, portraying her as a strong, confident woman. However, Ellen’s compiling of her great aunt’s archive shows how Hollywood changed a young Miss Harvey’s perception of herself, documenting the change from her happy-go-lucky photos in her back garden to the professional and somewhat scared ones of Hollywood. (To see these for yourself, check out Ellen's instagram.

The first photos Ellen shows are of a smiling, child Nita, playing in the back garden with friends. She is performing for her ‘constant companion’, with smiles and laughs in all the photos her mother took. This sense of fun is lost when the pictures from Hollywood appear and the main theme of the photographs switches to submission.

However, we learn that Nita refused to go on the ‘casting couch’ and left her job at Paramount Pictures when she wasn’t getting paid enough. This surprises and inspires me, knowing that even then, young women were standing up for themselves and beginning to shatter the glass ceiling.

I arrived expecting to enjoy looking at photos from the past, and left feeling touched by one women’s story of how others made her view herself. It was a timely reminder of why the #MeToo movement of today is so important.

Niamh Spiers

Delving into Nita's archive

Family photos are a spur to conversation in many homes across Britain. As a nation, we love transporting ourselves back in time to when we were young, when our parents were young and when our grandparents were unrecognisable, through the most weathered of portals- photographs.

While going back several years invites the return of old memories, it's what our ancestors were getting up to before our time, that really sparks my imagination.    

Artist and senior lecturer at UCA Ellen Nolan, has gone back through her own family archives to explore performance within the constructed and domesticated image of her great aunt, the 1920s actress, Nita Harvey.

Ellen Nolan's Instagram account is full to the brim of constructed images of Nita as well as the more domesticated ones. It is well worth a look if you're interested in 1920s and '30s photographs. Budding photographers will  also enjoy Ellen Nolan's more modern compositions and montages. 

This event looks to offer a thought-provoking journey through family history between the two World Wars. I couldn't be more excited to take a trip to a completely different era and culture: a time before mobile phones and social media.       

Ellen will be speaking at 2 today (Monday 25th February) in DMU's Clephan Building. There may still be a couple of tickets left ....