Drawing directly from the archive of my British great-aunt Nita Harvey, who was selected by Hollywood director and producer Cecil B. DeMille in a worldwide Paramount beauty contest in 1933 and shipped to Hollywood, I expose Nita’s hidden history and Hollywood experience through remaking and wearing her archival costumes to facilitate new exchanges with the historical past. These performances – rich in personal and empathetic experience – follow Nita’s 1933 archival U.S route contemporarily and are captured as photographs and 16mm film stills to echo their cinematic context.
I enter Harvey’s archive through the prism of the story she told me as a child– “I didn’t make it in Hollywood because I refused to go on the casting couch,” – which was often repeated in our family conversations, at the same time that she showed me her Hollywood portraits, (which later became part of her archive). Nita’s oral tradition is embedded posthumously, as an unpublished narrative positioning Nita’s voice within the body of her existing archive. This alternate history and version of events, at odds with 1930s Hollywood mythology, gives voice to my great-aunt and the many women marginalised by the ‘star system’.
In collaboration with atelier Theresa Parker, I have created reproductions of two of Nita’s archival costumes, pattern-cut from archival photographs: a wool suit (which Nita made and wore to Hollywood) and her original Hollywood casting bikini (which Hollywood clothed her in). Wearing Nita’s remade outfits on visits to the same sites that she visited or stayed at in 1933 as an aspiring actress, I establish a dynamic between the embodied subject (Nita) in the present and the archival object (her photographs). The third costume, the Goddess Outfit, has just been finished and can be seen on my Instagram, and ready for my next performances, Nita travelled from London to New York via the ship, SS Manhattan, then later by train across America to Los Angeles (Hollywood), where she stayed at The Roosevelt Hotel and worked for Paramount studios as a newly signed ‘property’, on the Paramount Lot, filming the Pre-Code movie, Search for Beauty, (1934).
In London, England, Nita regularly photographed herself in her garden and house, creating sets with the help of her Vaudeville theatre family, producing, directing and staring in her own highly accomplished ‘selfies’. And by the time she returned home from Hollywood in 1934, she had amassed a vast archive of thousands of photographs, negatives, a Hollywood casting film, press cuttings, letters, diaries, hotel receipts, contracts, costumes and other ephemera detailing her Hollywood experience and her image as a young actress and woman.
Nita “walked out” of her Paramount contract in 1933 because she refused to go on the casting couch. Her refusal and rebellion are at the core of her story because this is a vastly untold Hollywood history, and one that directly related to her agency of herself and her own image. As Nita’s great-niece and as an artist, I reflect on the difficulty and dignity of her decision, as well as the courage she showed in her refusal and rebellion, despite her passionate desire for success.
I also reflect on how the context of her decision (her lived experience) may have influenced her collecting habit and the sense of control it may have given her, allowing her to exert agency over her own image and story, and how it is read and remembered. As a female relative and artist, I am reimagining and embodying Nita’s experience now, through her archive and my performance photographs and film stills. I am asking what has changed almost 100 years later, whilst offering new photographic approaches to working with an archive.