Donovan Smallwood's Langour

Langour is a series created by photographer Donovan Smallwood, in his words, a "love letter" and a "note of disillusionment", "an interaction between landscape and portraiture, serving as an exploration of nature, home, escape, and tranquility."

"I wanted to metaphorically capture myself in the landscapes, the spaces, and the people I photographed. Everything and everyone photographed served as a mirror for me and in that way the work has no choice but to be about being Black in a space of nature."
Donovan Smallwood

"A monarch butterfly lands on a white flower thick with petals. A soft gauzy light obscures and embraces a young man in a do-rag, eyes seemingly closed, the graceful branches of a tree mimicking his limbs at rest. 

But this is a clever play on the pastoral, for it is only at the end of the book that our location comes to light. The buildings of the Manhattan skyline emerge towering over the trees at the project’s last glance. We have been led through Central Park; a people’s park of green lawns, forest trails where a dark history lingers. A multitude of racist injustices have played out in its environs, none more famous than the devastating wrongful conviction of the ‘Central Park Five’, the name given to a group of teenage boys falsely accused of rape amidst a whipped up media frenzy and witchhunt in the late 1980s. It is here in this huge expanse of greenery, the living lungs of a city whose tensions spill into its supposed Eden, that Smallwood’s photographs have been made." (literally via)

photographs via

College Drinking Intensity, Gender, Social Structure and Social Media

Abstract: College drinking scholars have built a deep literature around the ways in which gender shapes drinking culture and its outcomes. Few have explicitly explored the way that gender combines with other structural attributes, like social class, and works through social media interaction to predict drinking intensity. We investigate the way gender, identity, and different types of social media involvement can help explain drinking intensity among college students at an institution with a strong party culture. 

A series of nested regressions show that men’s drinking intensity is more strongly associated with dimensions of male identity related to family social class and father’s political leaning. Furthermore, we find a complex relationship between drinking intensity and different dimensions of social media use. For both college women and men, there is a positive association between the intensity of use of general social media platforms and drinking intensity, but this association is not significant when accounting for their involvement in college party culture. However, after accounting for party culture involvement, our results suggest that use of apps related to hookup culture participation may represent an additional dimension that is associated with drinking intensity, a finding that seems especially prominent for some men. We conclude by discussing implications, limitations, and directions for future research. (Welser, Helm & Vander Ven, 2023)

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- Welser, H. T., Helm, B. & Vander Ven, T. (2023). Swipe for Your Right to Party: Gender, Social Structure, and Social Media in College Drinking Intensity. Sociological Focus; link

- photograph (University of California) via

Raphael Lemkin and the Concept of Genocide

"Murder had a name. Why was it named crime for one person to kill another, but not for a government to kill millions of people? Shouldn't states be held accountable for trying to destroy entire peoples - their lives, cultures and histories?"
Raphael Lemkin

Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959) was a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent. When he learned about the massacres of Armenians he developed a general interest in religious and ethnic persecution (via). Lemkin also cited "Quo Vadis", written by Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz, as a source of inspiration to protect minorities (via).

Here was a group of people collectively senteced to death for the only reason that they believed in Christ. And nobody could help them. I became so fascinated with the story that I looked up all the similar instances in  history. Raphael Lemkin

Lemkin was convinced that there was an international law needed that protected groups. In the 1930s, he tried to introduce legal safeguards at international forums but did not succeed (via). Presenting a paper at the Leagute of Nations legal committee in Madrid lost him his job (via). In the corridors of the United Nations, he was considered "unpleasant company", socially he was often ignored. Upon learning about the executions in Poland, in 1942, he wrote Roosevelt a letter asking him to take action and received the disappointing reply to be patient (via).

He became obsessed with a crime that, at that point, had no name: the mass murder of groups, simply because of their identity. He was aware of the Turkish massacre of Armenians and of the Assyrians murdered in Iraq – unpunished crimes that would allow Hitler to believe his final solution could be achieved without international intervention. Lemkin identified the stages that led to mass murder: the demonisation of a group, the destruction of its culture, restriction of its freedoms and rights, the small rehearsals of extermination. (via)

In his book "Axis Rule in Occupied Europe", published in 1944, Lemkin introduced the term "genocide", consisting of the Greek prefix genos ("race", tribe) and the Latin suffix cide (killing) (via), a new word for an old practice.

By ‘genocide’ we mean the destruction of a nation or of an ethnic group. This new word, coined by the author to denote an old practice in its modern development, is made from the ancient Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cide (killing)…. Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group. (via)

When Germany invaded Poland, Lemkin fled from Europe and sought asylum in Sweden, then in the United States. The parting words of his mother were:

You realize, Raphael, that it is you, not we, who needs protection now … of all of us only you do not live the life of love. You are the lonely and the loveless one. Still, you have been carrying the burden of your idea, which is based on love … We know you will continue your work, for the protection of peoples. Unfortunately, it is needed now more than ever before. (via)

Lemkin started teaching at Duke University. He joined the War Department in Washington, DC, as an analyst documenting Nazi atrocities. Later, he was part of the legal team preparing the Nuremberg Trials where he made sure the word "genocide" - although not yet a legal crime - was at least included in the indictment against the Nazi leaders. In Nuremberg he also learned about the death of 49 family members including his parents, who had been killed in death camps, the Warsaw ghetto and death marches or starved to death (via). The fact that genocide was not legally considered to be crime made Lemkin believe that the Nuremberg Trial did not serve complete justice (via)

His efforts and campaigns to see "genocide" added to the international law continued and finally, in December 1948, the United Nations approved the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide (via).

Genocide "embodies the social ontology of ‘groupism’, because genocide is about the destruction of groups per se, not individuals per se. Lemkin thought that the Nazi policies were radically new, but only in the context of modern civilization. Wars of extermination have marked human society from antiquity until the religious conflagrations of early modern Europe, after which the doctrine that dominated was that war should be conducted against states rather than populations. Given that forty-nine members of his family died in the Holocaust, Lemkin's ecumenical approach to human suffering is at once astonishing and exemplary." (Moses, 2012)

He spent his last years in poverty in a New York flat, his funeral was attended by only a few people (via). Despite the key role he played in the creation of international laws, despite changing "the world with one word" (via)  and the numerous awards he received and having been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize twice, he is "virtually unknown" (via), and a "prophet without honors" (via), 

The United States, Lemkin's adopted country, did not ratify the Genocide Convention during his lifetime. He believed that his efforts to prevent genocide had failed. "The fact is that the rain of my work fell on a fallow plain," he wrote, "only this rain was a mixture of the blood and tears of eight million innocent people throughout the world. Included also were the tears of my parents and my friends." (via)

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- Moses, A. D. (2012). Raphael Lemkin, and the Concept of Genocide.
- photograph (UN photo) of Raphael Lemkin via

Shtetl by the Sea

The first time David Godlis went to Miami Beach was to visit his grandparents. That was in the 1950s, he was a child and his grandparents had retired in South Beach, a sort of heaven for older generations and Jewish immigrants mostly originally coming from Eastern European countries. Later, he said these trips  were "like visiting Jewish Disneyland". When Godlis went to visit with his grandmother in 1974,  part of "that magic kingdom" had already disappeared. He was 22, took his his camera out on to Ocean Drive, shot sixty rolls of film in ten days capturing what was left of the magic (via) witnessing the end of an era. 

The environment had once been a thriving one attracting many people, offering - among other things - Yiddish-language vaudeville shows in art deco theatres (Yiddish would be abandoned by the second-generation immigrants in favour of English). 

His grandparents, like other immigrants in the community, were snowbirds who retired to South Florida after back-breaking work in the hustle-and-bustle atmosphere of New York City. A far cry from New York's harsh winters, these retirees were savoring the respite from the frost of the Northeast. 'Goodbye snow, hello coconuts,' Godlis writes in his book. (via)

When Florida repealed the discriminatory law barring Jewish Americans from owning real estate in 1949, Miami Beach became a magnet for the community. It was called "Little Jerusalem" or "Shtetl by the Sea" (via). In the 1970s, around 80% of the population of Miami Beach was Jewish,, with a peak in the 1980s (via). While in 1982, there were an estimated 60.000 Jewish households, more recent surveys put the number at a maximum of 16.000. Today, the legendary nightclub and theatre are no more, the demographics have changed. (via). But, as Godlis says, not all is lost.

In 2017, when I last returned to Miami Beach, I stayed in the little Century Hotel, looking pretty close to how it looked in 1974 when I first came upon it. I walked around to see where most of these pictures had been taken. To dream the dream I had photographed 40 years earlier. And I could still see it all. Even my cover girl in her cool Oliver Goldsmith sunglasses. The ocean and palm trees have a way of making those dreams come true. If only for a 1/125th of a second. David Godlis

In 1985, 10 years after I shot these photographs, I returned to Miami Beach with my wife, Eileen. I took her down to Ocean Drive to show her where they were taken and was astonished to find that most everyone was gone. I don’t think even in my early 30s I understood how fast time flies. Of course, many of the retired people I shot pictures of were dead 10 years later. But also many of them had been driven out by the Mariel boatlift of 1980. You can see what became of Ocean Drive in the bathroom shootout scene with Al Pacino in Brian DePalma’s Scarface. So Eileen and I stayed a little further up Collins Avenue the year. And I had to be very careful taking photographs on Ocean Drive that my camera wasn’t stolen.
David Godlis

photographs by David Godlis via   

Rudi Gernreich, "a great example of how far we haven't come"

Rudi Gernreich was born into a non-religious Jewish middle-class family in Vienna in 1922. When he was eight, his father committed suicide, Genreich was mainly raised by his mother and aunt who ran a fashion salon where he learned "the grammar of feminine adornment". In 1938, anti-semitism forced him and his mother  to flee the country. They left for the United States where they settled in Los Angeles. His mother baked pastries, Gernreich sold them door to door. Then he washed cadavers for autopsy. Years later, he recalled: "I grew up overnight. I do smile sometimes when people tell me my clothes are so body-conscious I must have studied anatomy. You bet I studied anatomy."

Gernreich studied art for a while, joined a dance company as a performer while designing the company's costumes. There he also met Harry Hay and became one of the cofounders the Mattachine Society, an early gay rights organisation. Genreich did not come out publicly. 

With his topless monokini, designed in 1964, Gernreich "dared to question the taboo of nudity, or more specifically, female nudity" causing outrage which ranged from the Pope forbidding Catholics to wear it to the French Riviera prohibiting it but also Denmark, Greece and the Netherlands banning it. 

The story of the topless bathing suit begins with Adolf Hitler. When Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Hitler banned public nudity with an executive order. The Post-Freudian Viennese had taken to exercising in the nude, regarding it as healthy. Among those who fled the Nazi regime was widowed Jewish mother Elizabeth Gernreich and her 16-year-old son Rudi. They came to America, where Rudi launched an L.A. career as dancer, fashion designer, and gay activist. He was a founder of the Mattachine Society, an early gay rights organization. 

Throughout his life, Gernreich retained the free, Viennese attitude to nudity. This was reflected above all in his swimsuits. In a 1962 issue of Women's Wear Daily, Gernreich declared: "Bosoms will be uncovered within five years." Thereafter journalists kept pressing him for specifics. "It was my prediction," Gernreich recalled. "For the sake of history, I didn't want [Emilio] Pucci to do it first." (via)

His fashion was more about statement than marketability, It was about questioning the way women's bodies were regulated by the fashion industry, about unisex clothing and the boundaries of gender entrenched within fashion. His no-bra bra was "a protest against the aesthetic ideal of breasts padded into uniformity". 

Fashion, as we know it, is dead. In the new environment of the future, people will accept their bodies. Clothes will be utilitarian, organic, and minimal. It will free us to think of more important things.

Rudi Gernreich, 1971

Fashion does come up from the streets now. Young people are saying ‘We are people, not men and women.’ There’s no sexual confusion. It’s a social change. Rudi Gernreich, 1967

Ahead of his time, Genreich is, in fact, "a great example of  how far we haven't come." (all sources via and via and via and via)

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photograph (by William Claxton, 1964, Vanity Fair) via 

Can Dogs be Racist?

Abstract: Can dogs be racist? Posing this question may seem odd and at worst, unhelpfully provocative at a time when the discourse of ‘colour-blindness’ is so pervasive. Yet the idea of ‘racist dogs’ remains salient within the post-settler societies of eastern and southern Africa, where dogs have been an integral if overlooked tool of colonial practices of racialization. This article traces the colonial demarcation of ‘native dogs’ – juxtaposed to white settlers’ ‘pet’ dogs – to understand how racial categories were imposed on domesticated animals, and how these racialized animals were then colonized through rabies legislation. 

Although the formal racialization of dogs ended with the dawn of political decolonization in the early 1960s, dogs continued to be co-opted for postcolonial racial discourse. Dogs were in a prominent position in postcolonial society due to their prevalence in the security arrangements of white homes as well as in the security forces of white supremacist Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa. The intensity of the relationship between white minorities, their canine pets and the surrounding African population points toward the uncomfortable conclusion that in the heightened racial environments of decolonizing settler Africa, dogs could be made to be racist. (Doble, 2020)

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- Doble, J. (2020). Can Dogs be Racist? The Colonial Legacies of Racialized Dogs in Keny and Zambia. History Workshop Journal, 89, 68-89.
- photograph by Elliott Erwitt (Magnum) via

Fleeing Humanity. By Akwugo Emejulu.

"When did you first learn that you were a non-human? For me, it was a slow realisation. To begin with, I formly rejected the idea. When a white boy in third grade called me a n*gger and I ran to my white teacher in tears, she, unmoved, simply shrugged her shoulders and told me to ignore it. And that was that. (...)" Emejulu (2022:11)

"Granny, as we called her, had incredible stories. Her stories were my first introduction to Blackness, and, by extension, aspirational humanness." (ibid.:15) "My grandmother did not want to be white, even though (...) she had the ability to disappear into whiteness. It never occurred to her to be white - she wanted to be human. But, of course, I now understand that it is impossible to separate the two." (ibid.:17)

"The understanding of my non-humanity crept up on me and now I cannot let it go. I want to pick it up, turn it over in the light. Study it. Understand it. And embrace it. I can't say exactly how I came to this realisation. I felt my exclusion from the supposedly universal category of the 'human' most keenly in my alienated relationship to the social sciences: much of it didn't apply to me or Black women more generally because it was the work of white scholars describing their implicitly white world. Also, in my exhausting encounters in feminist activist and academic circles, I had to constantly remind my white 'sisters' that Black women were, in fact, women (...). (ibid.:19f)

"To believe I am non-human does not mean I believe in my own inferiority. Rather, it means I believe that the human is a construction of whiteness and any discussion about Black inferiority is a product of the futile struggle to be recognised as human." (ibid.:23)

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- Emejulu, A.  (2022). Fugitive Feminism. Silver Press.
- photographs of Diana Ross by Harry Langdon via and via 

2.2%

In the United States, the average woman weighs 140 pounds (63.50 kg), the average fashion model 117 pounds (53.07 kg) while being 5'11'' (more than 180 cm) tall. In the United Kingdom, 45% of women are size 16+, people these size make up 2.2% of women shown in advertisements (via).

‘Our campaign found that 57% of adults have never seen themselves represented in the media. This is why we’re committed to representing all body types, so the everyday consumer can feel empowered. It’s important to shed light on the fact that every body is beautiful and that no one needs to conform to typical beauty standards.’ (Yours Clothing)

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photograph via

Narrative images: Window Shopping, Granada, 1930s

"An African American woman, dressed in her Saturday go-to-town-best, stands outside a store window, chin in hand, contemplating the contents in the window. The image is reflective and thoughtful. What is she thinking? And what lies beyond the frame of this photograph? In Mississippi in the 1930s, could she walk into this store, perhaps try on clothes or hats, and make a purchase? If she were welcomed in this store, would she have the means to buy the merchandise? The woman is separated from the contents of the store window by the large plate glass of segregation.

As in most of her photographs, Welty captures an artistic moment in this image, but the reality of the world outside the frame of the photograph is always present. In this instance, Welty raises questions about this woman as a consumer. How is her ability to buy a mark of freedom conveying access to the American dream? Grace Elizabeth Hale states in her book Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 that shopping and segregation were uneasily intertwined. Department stores, like railroad cars and movie theaters, were “muddled middle” spaces where segregation remained vulnerable, “neither public nor private, neither black nor white” (9). It was in these “muddled middle” spaces that middle class African Americans chose to shop. While whites and blacks might be separated in schools, churches, restaurants, and other spaces, the ritual of Saturday shopping “belonged to all southerners” (Hale 182). Welty captures this “muddled middle” of a Mississippi small town on Saturday in the group of white men just down the street from the African American woman gazing in the shop window."

Mae Claxton

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photograph by Eudora Alice Welty, 1909-2001, (c) by Eudora Welty Foundation) via

Ten Thousand Thanks

Ten thousand thanks for following the tenth year of "Diversity is Beautiful", a wonderful year with some progress for some marginalised communities in some places (and none at all in others), a year of reflection, joy and sunshine (which is good unless too much due to the climate change), a year of excitement and Blur's appearance (scream!) at Wembley Stadium this week. Thank you!