ELLEN NOLAN // Staten Island Ferry, NY
Archivo LAB 2025
Limited Print Edition
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ELLEN NOLAN
Staten Island Ferry, NY. (Performance as Nita Harvey, 2023)
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Inkjet print on 100% Cotton Rag Fine Art Paper
From an edition of 50, numbered on the reverse
Image size: 15 x 27 cm
Paper size: 24 x 30 cm
Unframed
The Nita Harvey Archive draws directly from the heterogeneous archive of Ellen Nolan's British great-aunt, Nita Harvey, who was selected by Hollywood director, Cecil B. DeMille in a worldwide Paramount beauty contest, and signed to Paramount Studios in 1933, in a three-picture contract. Nolan inherited her archive in 2007, after it had been stored in her aunt’s garage since Harvey’s death in 1987.
Drawing directly from the archive, using feminist film and photography theory together with methodologies of archival studies, radical empathy, oral history, trauma and studies of early Hollywood cinema to underpin her approach, Nolan exposes Harvey’s hidden history and repurposing archival materials to facilitate new exchanges with the historical past. She enters Harvey’s archive through the prism of her story – “I didn’t make it in Hollywood; I refused to go on the casting couch,” – repeated in family conversations. This oral history will be embedded posthumously, as an unpublished narrative positioning Harvey’s voice within the body of her existing archive. This alternate history, at odds with 1930’s Hollywood mythology, will give voice to Harvey, and the many women marginalised by the ‘star system’.
In collaboration with atelier Theresa Parker, Nolan created reproductions of Harvey’s archival outfits. Wearing Harvey’s remade outfits, visiting the same sites that she stayed in 1933 as an aspiring actress, she establishes a dynamic between the embodied subject in the present, and the archival object.
