HOW THE WORLD’S BIGGEST SLUM STOPPED THE VIRUS

Dharavi contained Covid-19 against all the odds. Now its people need to survive an economic catastrophe.

Normally, Khwaja Qureshi’s recycling facility in Dharavi, the slum in Mumbai, would be no place for three newborn tabby kittens. Before efforts to contain the novel coronavirus idled much of the Indian economy, the 350-square-foot concrete room was a hive of nonstop industry. Five workers were there 12 hours a day, seven days a week, dumping crushed water bottles, broken television casings, and discarded lunchboxes into a roaring iron shredder, then loading the resulting mix of plastic into jute sacks for sale to manufacturers. But during a recent visit, the shredder was silent and the workers gone, decamped to their villages in India’s north. That left the kittens plenty of space to gambol across the bare floor, nap on a comfortable cardboard box, or be amused by the neighborhood kids who came to visit.

Qureshi, a stout, thick-fingered man of 43 whose father founded the operation, mostly ignored his feline workplace companions. He’d been spending his days sitting on a plastic chair, drinking cup after cup of milk tea and chatting with other Dharavi entrepreneurs, all of them part of Mumbai’s fearsomely efficient but completely informal recycling industry, who stopped by to talk business. The consensus was pessimistic. India’s economy is in an historic slump, and less economic activity means fewer things being thrown away—and also less demand to make new products from the old. No one had much hope that things would pick up soon.

▲ Khwaja Qureshi is waiting for his employees to return.

The irony is that Dharavi, which has a population of about 1 million and is probably the most densely packed human settlement on Earth, has largely contained the coronavirus. Thanks to an aggressive response by local officials and the active participation of residents, the slum has gone from what looked like an out-of-control outbreak in April and May to a late-September average of 1.3 cases per day for every 100,000 residents, compared with about 7 per 100,000 in Portugal. That success has made Dharavi an unlikely role model, its methods copied by epidemiologists elsewhere and singled out for praise by the World Health Organization. It’s also a remarkable contrast to the disaster unfolding in the rest of India. The country has recorded more than 6.5 million confirmed cases—putting it on track to soon overtake the U.S.—and over 103,000 deaths.

Dharavi’s economic calamity, however, may be just getting started. Its maze of tarpaulin tents and illegally built tenements and workshops have traditionally served as a commercial engine for all of Mumbai, a frenetic crossroads of exchange and entrepreneurship at the heart of India’s financial capital. Before the pandemic, it generated more than $1 billion a year in activity, providing a base for industries from pottery and leather-tanning to recycling and the garment trade. Deprivation abounded, but Dharavi could also be a social accelerator, allowing the poorest to begin their long climb to greater prosperity—and to joining the consumer class that powers the $3 trillion Indian economy. Qureshi’s own family is a case in point. His father was born in the hinterland to a poor tenant farmer but moved to Dharavi to work in a textile factory, getting into the recycling business after he realized the value of the plastic packaging that new spools of thread arrived in.

▲ Kiran Dighavkar at an isolation center.

Led by an energetic municipal manager named Kiran Dighavkar, who was also in charge of the slum’s Covid-19 response, people in Dharavi are now trying to restart their economic lives without seeding new outbreaks. Their success or failure will be an important example for similar places around the world—areas that are home to as much as a sixth of the global population and which no government hoping for a durable recovery from the virus can afford to ignore. Whether in Nairobi’s Kibera or Rio de Janeiro’s hilltop favelas, slum economies are inextricably linked to the cities around them. In some countries their inhabitants account for 90% of the informal urban workforce—an army of construction laborers, small-time vendors, assembly-line helpers, and restaurant servers that developing world metropolises rely on to function. Those jobs are never easy, but they are often preferable to the monotony of rural poverty.

The challenge in Dharavi is to reclaim this vitality safely. “Now we have to live with this disease,” Dighavkar said in an interview at a temporary hospital, one of several he’d established to handle Covid-19 cases. “Dharavi is a hub of activity, and we cannot let it go.”

Dharavi’s modern history dates to the late 19th century, when Muslim tanners, looking for a place to practice their odoriferous trade outside the limits of British-run Bombay, built a rudimentary settlement nearby. By the 1930s it was attracting other migrants: potters from Gujarat, crafters of gold and silver embroidery from north India, and leather workers from the Tamil-speaking south, among many others. All added their own living quarters, building with whatever materials they could find, giving little notice to the fact they were, technically, squatting on government-owned land.

As the Raj gave way to independent India and Mumbai’s population swelled, the teeming slum eventually found itself not on the city’s fringe but near its geographic center. By then, many of its tents and huts had been replaced by structures of brick, concrete, and tile, arrayed around communal wells and powered by electricity from the municipal grid—even though almost no residents had formal land title. There were far too many of them to evict, or ignore, and in the 1970s, vote-seeking politicians began to make small improvements, such as public latrines. By the time the area played a starring role in 2008’s Slumdog Millionaire, soaring housing costs in the rest of Mumbai had even made it attractive to some white-collar workers looking for affordable, centrally located housing.

Meanwhile, Mumbai’s government had begun floating ideas for a redevelopment, one that would replace lopsided squatters’ homes with modern apartments and move factories and workshops into purpose-built quarters, probably elsewhere in the metropolis. But successive consultations, proposals, tenders, and visioning exercises failed to settle on any plan. That was due in part to opposition from residents, who pointed out that even if renovations brought better housing, their jobs might be relocated to distant industrial parks.

▲ International Footsteps’ workshop.

Dighavkar, who is 37 and a civil engineer by training, came to Dharavi with modest ambitions. Last year he was named assistant municipal commissioner for G Ward North, a swath of Mumbai that includes the slum. His previous posting was in the historic core, where his signature project had been the construction of a viewing platform in front of Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, an architecturally spectacular Victorian rail hub, that allowed tourists to snap photos without dashing into traffic. He also proudly took credit for building the city’s costliest public convenience, a $122,000 toilet complex on a busy seaside promenade.

▲ Dr. Asad Khan (center) and Dighavkar at a field hospital.

With redevelopment plans in flux, Dighavkar’s superiors had little enthusiasm for putting significant money into Dharavi. So in his first months in his new role he focused on the middle-class neighborhoods at its edges, laying new sidewalks and making symbolic changes such as switching the figures on crosswalk signals from male to female.

Dharavi’s first coronavirus case was posthumous. In early April, a 56-year-old resident tested positive after he’d already died. There were only about 2,000 confirmed infections in India at the time, mostly traceable to international travel, and the news seemed to indicate a serious problem. A place with more people than San Francisco, crammed into an area smaller than Central Park, is hardly a promising environment for social distancing. As many as 80 people may share a single public toilet in Dharavi, and it’s not uncommon for a family of eight to occupy a 100-square-foot home. Infections were soon spreading rapidly, prompting the Mumbai government to impose draconian containment measures. Whole streets were sealed off behind checkpoints, with officers on patrol and camera-equipped drones buzzing overhead. With rare exceptions, no one could leave the area, not that there was anywhere to go: The rest of the city, and all of India, were locked down, too, though usually with much lighter enforcement.

But to Dighavkar, the impossibility of keeping slum residents in their homes quickly became evident. At the very least, people had to come out to use the toilet, to fill water bottles from public taps, and to collect food packets donated by charities. Gradually he and his colleagues developed a more precise approach. Rather than waiting for infected people to announce themselves, the government began dispatching teams of health-care workers to find them, going door to door asking about symptoms, offering free fever screenings, and administering tests to those likeliest to have the virus. They commandeered wedding halls, sports centers, and schools as isolation facilities to separate suspected cases from the rest of the population. Those who tested positive were sent to hospital wards that had been dedicated entirely to treating Covid-19, while contact tracers raced to locate people they’d spent time with.

Some were reluctant to cooperate. Many people in Dharavi work in unlicensed businesses that are in perpetual danger of being closed, and have good reasons to avoid contact with the authorities. But Dighavkar’s workers gradually won their trust, thanks in part to residents returning from quarantine telling of a comfortable stay and competent care. By July the number of new cases had declined to an average of 10 a day, compared with 45 per day in May, although the figure has since ticked modestly upward.

▲ Valli Ilaiyaraaja in her Dharavi home.

Some scientists have suggested the impressive numbers aren’t entirely the result of public-health measures. Antibody surveys over the summer found that almost 60% of the population in certain Mumbai slums had coronavirus antibodies, indicating that a degree of herd immunity could be at work. But even the most fatalistic virologists credit Dighavkar’s model with keeping mortality low, with some help from a youthful population. At just 270 confirmed deaths, Dharavi has one of the lowest Covid-19 fatality rates of any urban area in India, and methods developed there are now being rolled out across the country as the disease tears through smaller cities.

The apparent containment of the virus in Dharavi, or at least of its worst effects, didn’t spare its people economically. Many have had experiences like those of Valli Ilaiyaraaja, who used to work as a cleaner for three families in a neighborhood near the slum, and said none would allow her back even after the national lockdown ended in June. Their apartment buildings had banned entry to outside help, out of fear that cleaners and cooks would bring the virus with them. Similar policies remain in place across the city.

This has resulted in some inconvenience for Mumbai’s middle and upper classes—one local company had to suspend sales of dishwashers because of an overwhelming volume of orders. But it’s a financial catastrophe for people like Ilaiyaraaja. She and her three young daughters now depend entirely on her husband, who lost his job as a welder during the lockdown and is making just 100 rupees ($1.37) a day loading trucks. That’s not enough to pay for the cost of traveling to their home village in South India, where they could live rent-free, nor to cover school tuition for the girls. So the family is in limbo, waiting both for the economy to pick up and for the stigma attached to slum dwellers to fade. “We are fed up with this virus,” Ilaiyaraaja said in her tiny tenement apartment, two of her daughters sitting shyly by her side, “and with waiting for this nightmare to be over.”

On a muggy summer day, seven anxious-looking people, all wearing masks, stepped off a minibus and into a large vinyl tent that had taken over a parking lot on Dharavi’s outskirts. The tent housed a 192-bed field hospital for Covid-19 cases and had been carefully designed to triage incoming patients without letting them spread the virus. Past the double doors the group entered a spacious holding area monitored by a thermal camera on a tripod. Just behind, in a sealed-off observation booth, Dr. Asad Khan issued instructions through a microphone while observing the camera feed on a monitor.

When the system detected a fever, the monitor was supposed to show a red box around a patient, while normal temperatures would prompt a green box. The trouble, though, was that all the boxes were green—not something a physician greeting confirmed coronavirus carriers would expect to see. This prompted Khan to query the new arrivals on why they’d been brought to his tent. A young man stepped forward as the group’s unofficial spokesperson, and after some back and forth, Khan learned that none of them had even been tested for the virus. They were contacts of positive cases and were supposed to have been taken to an isolation center, not the hospital. A few minutes later they climbed back into their vehicle and were driven away.

Dighavkar, watching from inside the booth, was pleased. A bus going to the wrong facility was a harmless mix-up, but letting seven potentially healthy people interact with infectious Covid-19 patients would have been a disaster. The thermal camera and Khan’s questioning had prevented that outcome—evidence, to Dighavkar, that the system was working. “This is our own invention,” he said of the camera-and-interview process. “This is the procedure. Contactless entry.”

▲ Dr. Khan screens patients.

He was conscious, though, that a system sufficient to contain the virus with the economy halted could be severely tested by the resumption of more activity. By July some parts of Dharavi were coming slowly back to life. Beggars had returned to intersections, though usually wearing masks as they shuffled from car to car. Fabric wholesalers had rolled up their steel shutters, while corner stores were again places for groups of local women to meet and chat.

What worried Dighavkar was the prospect of reopening factories—cramped, poorly ventilated places where laborers spend hours on end, elbow-to-elbow. “Once the factories start again, maybe we’ll get more cases,” he said in his office. In front of his broad wooden desk, someone had set up neat rows of chairs to allow subordinates to gather before him like students at an assembly. “We have to make sure safety measures are taken.” His most urgent priority was to get as much protective gear to workers as possible. The municipal government had been distributing masks, gloves, face shields, and sanitizer to factories for free, turning a blind eye to illegal operations in the hope that owners would accept help. Regardless of their official status, “we are here to take care of them,” Dighavkar said.

The future of Dharavi’s manufacturing sector may look like International Footsteps, a factory that makes sandals for Western mall brands such as Aldo. To get there, you must first turn off one of the slum’s raucous commercial drags and into a lane of decrepit buildings covered in tarps and corrugated steel sheets, which opens after a little while into something of a public square. There, if you skip between a puddle of foul water and a dead rat, then duck beneath a tangle of electrical wires, you’ll come to a dark, damp tunnel leading to what feels like a different world. In a pristine marble hallway, a multilingual sign asks visitors to apply some hand sanitizer from a dispenser on the wall. Just beyond is a bright workshop, where during a recent visit eight artisans sat cross-legged at workstations spaced about two feet apart—considerably less jammed-in than they would have been before this year. Managers had cleared out some upstairs storage space to allow more distance between each employee, and all of them were wearing disposable smocks, masks, and plastic face shields, purchased at the company’s expense. The protection raises costs, “but it’s required for the safety of everyone,” said floor manager Vijayanti Kewlani, who’d donned the same gear.

The problem, for International Footsteps as well as other businesses in Dharavi, is that “everyone” isn’t who it used to be. Only about two-thirds of the slum’s people are formal residents; the rest are rural migrants who traditionally slept on factory floors or shared rented rooms, returning to their hometowns a few times a year. But there was no government help to cover wages during the national lockdown, and it caused a severe crisis for these laborers. With snack bars and mess halls shut, even those who could afford food struggled to find enough to eat.

▲ Workers at International Footsteps.

Many had little choice but to go home, a journey that had to be made on foot, because the government had suspended train and bus services to contain infections. It was likely the country’s largest forced migration since Partition, the violent 1947 division of India and Pakistan—and had the unintended result of spreading the coronavirus deep into rural areas. With the global economic slump depressing activity in cities, a large proportion of the migrants have stayed in the countryside.

International Footsteps tried to keep connected with its workers, paying them 80% of their salaries for the first month of lockdown and 60% for the second. It also offered to cover the cost of transportation back to the city and is looking into securing more spacious housing—maybe even with the luxury of an attached toilet—for staff who return. But only 30% of its personnel have resumed their jobs, mostly Dharavi locals, leaving the company well short of the numbers it might need to fill large orders.

Suraj Ahmed was one of the few who’d come back—in his case from a small village in Uttar Pradesh. He couldn’t afford to live in the room he’d been sharing with two co-workers, because neither had yet returned. So the company was letting him stay on the premises for free, until he could find a more permanent arrangement. The visible precautions in the factory made him feel safer, Ahmed said as he attached a finely worked leather strap to the top of a new sandal, his wiry beard peeking out from under his mask. But he was more impressed with the 10% raise he’d received for coming back to work. “I have to earn a living,” he said.

Despite its absent workers and stepped-up protective measures, Dharavi could still provide an extremely hospitable environment for the virus—particularly if a rush of returning migrants reintroduces it at large scale. The only solution, Dighavkar says, is “screening, screening, screening,” an unrelenting effort to track down infected people and isolate them from the community. “It will be part of our continuous process from now on.”

The front line of Dighavkar’s plan will be made up of women. His department has assembled an army of almost 6,000 health workers and volunteers, mainly from Dharavi itself, who’ve been given thermometers, pulse oximeters, and basic training in how to spot Covid-19. The idea is to send them house to house, day after day, in continuous sweeps of every part of the slum, and to keep doing it until the end of the pandemic. It’s a substantial commitment of resources, but the human and economic toll of a renewed outbreak would be far larger.

One morning in July, after one of the heaviest monsoon rainfalls Mumbai had seen in years, about a dozen of these women gathered at a public hospital to collect their addresses for the day and suit up in protective gear. Some undertook a tricky maneuver that involved pulling the hems of their saris up and back between their legs, tucking the fabric behind their waists, to step into the white coveralls they’d been issued. After drawing the hoods over their hair, they looked a little like snowmen.

▲ Bhoyar prepares to visit Dharavi residents.

Sunanda Bhoyar was more practically attired, in a block-print tunic over billowy pink trousers, and donned her suit with ease. She was one of the group’s few professionals, a registered nurse assigned to guide the less-experienced workers. She soon set off into the heart of Dharavi’s residential quarter, a warren of footpaths and alleyways often too narrow for a pair of people to walk abreast. There was almost no sunlight, the result of haphazard additions that had pushed the buildings on either side to structurally questionable heights.

Bhoyar knew the way and soon found what she was looking for: the home of an elderly couple who’d just tested positive and were being treated in hospital. She told the young man who answered the door that everyone who lived in the house needed to go to a quarantine center for observation and testing. But the man, who said he worked as a sales manager at an insurance company, making him prosperous by local standards, was reluctant. He and his three brothers had four rooms, he said—plenty of space to isolate at home. Bhoyar wasn’t having it. She ordered everyone’s hands marked with indelible ink—also used in India to prevent people from voting twice in elections—to ensure they’d be brought to quarantine.

Soon, Bhoyar approached a neighbor, who was skeptical that he was at risk, claiming that he and his wife didn’t even know the people who’d been infected. Contact tracing suggested otherwise. Bhoyar patiently explained that the man’s 9-year-old daughter was friends with one of the brothers’ children, and often visited their house to play. The neighbor’s family wouldn’t have to quarantine, she said, but would be visited again to see if anyone had developed symptoms. As Bhoyar spoke, a city sanitation worker stepped forward to spray the house with disinfectant. Bhoyar soon gathered up her entourage of assistants to move on.

▲ Bhoyar instructing residents on protective measures.

This kind of tedious work has none of the technological glitz of an innovative treatment or the silver-bullet promise of an effective vaccine. But as the rain started to pick up again, Bhoyar said she was convinced that, in Dharavi, it would be enough to keep the virus at bay. “Precaution will be our key focus going forward,” she said—“social distancing, awareness related to hygiene, fever screening, and sanitization.” Even with the massive slum slowly coming back to life, Bhoyar added, “I’m not really scared.”

halloween

The 25 Best Horror Games To Play On Halloween 2020

From gamespot/By

There are all kinds of horror-tinged media to choose from nowadays, but games may be the most chilling medium of all due to the level of immersion and interactivity they impart. If you’ve ever sat in a dark room with headphones and played something like Silent Hill or Resident Evil, you know that unique feeling of terror we’re talking about. And god forbid you need to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Horror games aren’t exactly for the weak of heart.

But as Halloween approaches, there’s no more fitting genre for the season, and luckily, there are a wealth of horror games out there well worth your time. The genre had humble beginnings in the late ’80s, with a wave of fantastic games coming out in the three subsequent decades. And thanks to the rise of indie games, there are more scary games out now than ever before.

In 2020 we’ve seen some excellent horror games released, such as Capcom’s follow-up to its Resident Evil 2 remake, Resident Evil 3. But even more are yet to come; we’re still looking forward to horror games like The Dark Pictures: Little Hope and Amnesia: Rebirth to keep genre fans busy this fall.

Whether you plan to work your way through your horror backlog on your own or invite friends over to experience the jump scares with you, we’ve got you covered this Halloween season and beyond. We’ve gathered a list of the most terrifying and memorable games every horror enthusiast should experience this Halloween season. Genre classics like Silent Hill 2, Resident Evil Remake, and Dead Space are represented here, but you’ll also find more surprising and modern choices interspersed throughout. Regardless of their notoriety, the horror games we highlight below (listed in no particular order) are all ones that left us with lasting memories.

Which horror games will you be playing this fall? Shout out your favorites in the comments below.

Grandparents Living in Chinatowns Are Now Unexpected Fashion Icons [Interview]

From My Modern Met/By Sara Barnes /October 27, 2020

https://mymodernmet.com/chinatown-pretty-book/

Chinatown Pretty Book

Chinatown Pretty: Fashion and Wisdom from Chinatown’s Most Stylish Seniors, by Andria Lo and Valerie Luu, published by Chronicle Books 2020
This post may contain affiliate links. If you make a purchase, My Modern Met may earn an affiliate commission. Please read our disclosure for more info.

Senior citizens seem like unlikely sources of statement-making style; but as Andria Lo and Valerie Luu show in their book Chinatown Pretty, grandparents—specifically those in Chinatowns across North America—are unintentional fashion icons. Also known as “poh pohs” and “gung gungs” (grandmas and grandpas, respectively), the authors share portraits of the impeccably dressed city dwellers in San Francisco, Chicago, Vancouver, and beyond.

The folks featured in Chinatown Pretty aren’t afraid to buck fashion conventions. They mix patterns or wear contrasting colors that some might say clash. Floral printed shirts are worn underneath plaid blazers and lighter jackets are layered with heavy coats that are accented with a mismatching scarf. On the hanger, these combinations don’t work. But when on the body and worn with the right mindset, the outfits have a fashionable ease about them. “Some of the magic we observe in the Chinatown style is that it’s quite effortless and unexpected,” the authors tell My Modern Met. “Pieces that shouldn’t really work together, that clash or are from different eras, end up having their own unique harmony.”

Chinatown Pretty includes inspiring fashion as well as the stories of the stylish seniors that Lo and Luu encountered when writing the book. We spoke with the authors about the documenting process as well as what younger people can learn from the older generation. Scroll down to read our exclusive interview.

Elderly Fashion Icons

Chinatown Pretty: Fashion and Wisdom from Chinatown’s Most Stylish Seniors, by Andria Lo and Valerie Luu, published by Chronicle Books 2020

What was the inspiration for Chinatown Pretty?

The style was intriguing to us and we wanted to know more—who were these women and where did they get their shoes?

We decided to investigate. We found that asking about their clothes was a great way to learn about this generation and hear some fascinating perspectives that are often not brought to light.

Elderly Fashion Icons

Chinatown Pretty: Fashion and Wisdom from Chinatown’s Most Stylish Seniors, by Andria Lo and Valerie Luu, published by Chronicle Books 2020

Why do you think that grandmas and grandpas have such a great sense of style?

A lot of the “trends” we see are rooted in Chinatown’s history and Chinese culture. We’ve learned from talking to subjects that their garments are often handmade (women were able to get jobs in garment factories without knowing English) or brought over to the U.S. when they immigrated, and they’ve retained those pieces through the decades.

What about their sartorial choices makes them so fashionable?

There’s a certain je ne sais quoi with Chinatown seniors—it often involves outfits that play with bold colors, patterns, and handmade or customized clothing and accessories. Some of the magic we observe in the Chinatown style is that it’s quite effortless and unexpected. Pieces that shouldn’t really work together, that clash or are from different eras, end up having their own unique harmony.

There is an appreciation for color, pattern, and dressing pragmatically—layering up and keeping warm, while also keeping the sun out with baseball caps or long-billed visors. It’s not uncommon for us to see folks six or more layers deep in clothing, even in the warmer months!

Elderly Fashion Icons

Chinatown Pretty: Fashion and Wisdom from Chinatown’s Most Stylish Seniors, by Andria Lo and Valerie Luu, published by Chronicle Books 2020

Is there a look that one subject wore that is particularly memorable for you?

Ms. Yang had a wonderful silver bob that she cut herself and an oversized plaid blazer and pops of color that definitely got our heart racing. She lives in an affordable housing building for seniors in San Francisco Chinatown. We sat down in her apartment to interview her with her daughter, she told us she had Alzheimer’s and can’t remember her past too much. But she says that she’s healthy and her kids and grandkids are also healthy and good. We really liked her attitude, letting go of control, and being happy with what she has.

Elderly Fashion Icons

Chinatown Pretty: Fashion and Wisdom from Chinatown’s Most Stylish Seniors, by Andria Lo and Valerie Luu, published by Chronicle Books 2020

In approaching these people about their style, you learned a lot about their backstories. Do you think this informed their overall sense of style?

Chinatown Pretty, in addition to being about interesting fashion, has allowed us to learn more about Chinese American history. Clothes are a gateway to the seniors’ life stories and immigration journeys. San Francisco has a rich immigration history—from people coming here during the Gold Rush to building railroads to working in restaurants and garment factories—and Chinatown has been a landing pad for many of the people profiled in the book. The cultural values and histories of Chinatown seniors are reflected in their clothes. Reusing, repurposing, functionality, making their own clothes, keeping warm (layering) and sun protection are all values that emerge in this style.

Elderly Fashion Icons

Chinatown Pretty: Fashion and Wisdom from Chinatown’s Most Stylish Seniors, by Andria Lo and Valerie Luu, published by Chronicle Books 2020

What was the process like in putting together this book? 

Putting together the book involved traveling to a few new Chinatowns—Chicago and Vancouver—and going out to shoot new people in all the other cities we’ve been to before. There were lots of rainy days walking around Chicago and New York Chinatown as we went scouting in the spring of 2018.

Were there any unexpected things you learned or challenges with writing it?

With writing, there was a challenge of striking a happy balance between providing Chinatown history and capturing Chinatown as they are today. One would not exist without the other—but our primary goal was capturing the seniors and the neighborhoods as they are right now. So it’s 20% history and 80% a snapshot of the individuals that we were able to meet and the information we were able to gather in the sweet and short serendipitous encounters with them.

Stylish Senior Citizens Living in Chinatown

Chinatown Pretty: Fashion and Wisdom from Chinatown’s Most Stylish Seniors, by Andria Lo and Valerie Luu, published by Chronicle Books 2020

What can the younger generations learn from these fashionable grandmas and grandpas?

We’re struck and inspired by how the seniors live an independent lifestyle well into their 80s and 90s. They are active city dwellers, walking and using public transit, exercising and socializing in public parks, and shopping local!

Also through this project, we’ve gotten to learn about and partner with nonprofits in various Chinatowns that do important work to preserve and protect the community. There is a lot of behind the scenes effort to help Chinatowns continue to be livable neighborhoods.

What can readers expect from your book?

There are a total of 113 stories, many that you won’t find on our Instagram or blog, and a lot of the stories are longer and more in-depth. It’s a book you’ll want to soak up and slowly observe the details of. In COVID times, we can’t mingle or meet up in person as much, but we hope through this book, readers will feel like they’re getting to know some new friends or neighbors.

See more stylish senior citizens from Chinatown Pretty:

Elderly Fashion Icons

Chinatown Pretty: Fashion and Wisdom from Chinatown’s Most Stylish Seniors, by Andria Lo and Valerie Luu, published by Chronicle Books 2020
This post may contain affiliate links. If you make a purchase, My Modern Met may earn an affiliate commission. Please read our disclosure for more info.

Elderly Fashion Icons

Chinatown Pretty: Fashion and Wisdom from Chinatown’s Most Stylish Seniors, by Andria Lo and Valerie Luu, published by Chronicle Books 2020

Elderly Fashion Icons

Chinatown Pretty: Fashion and Wisdom from Chinatown’s Most Stylish Seniors, by Andria Lo and Valerie Luu, published by Chronicle Books 2020

Elderly Fashion Icons

Chinatown Pretty: Fashion and Wisdom from Chinatown’s Most Stylish Seniors, by Andria Lo and Valerie Luu, published by Chronicle Books 2020

Elderly Fashion Icons

Chinatown Pretty: Fashion and Wisdom from Chinatown’s Most Stylish Seniors, by Andria Lo and Valerie Luu, published by Chronicle Books 2020

Stylish Senior Citizens Living in Chinatown

Chinatown Pretty: Fashion and Wisdom from Chinatown’s Most Stylish Seniors, by Andria Lo and Valerie Luu, published by Chronicle Books 2020

Elderly Fashion Icons

Chinatown Pretty: Fashion and Wisdom from Chinatown’s Most Stylish Seniors, by Andria Lo and Valerie Luu, published by Chronicle Books 2020

Stylish Senior Citizens Living in Chinatown

Chinatown Pretty: Fashion and Wisdom from Chinatown’s Most Stylish Seniors, by Andria Lo and Valerie Luu, published by Chronicle Books 2020

Elderly Fashion Icons

Chinatown Pretty: Fashion and Wisdom from Chinatown’s Most Stylish Seniors, by Andria Lo and Valerie Luu, published by Chronicle Books 2020

Stylish Senior Citizens Living in Chinatown

Stylish Senior Citizens Living in Chinatown

Chinatown Pretty: Fashion and Wisdom from Chinatown’s Most Stylish Seniors, by Andria Lo and Valerie Luu, published by Chronicle Books 2020

Elderly Fashion Icons

Chinatown Pretty: Fashion and Wisdom from Chinatown’s Most Stylish Seniors, by Andria Lo and Valerie Luu, published by Chronicle Books 2020

Chinatown Pretty: Website | Instagram | Facebook
Chinatown Pretty Book: Chronicle Books | Bookshop.org | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Green Apple Books

My Modern Met granted permission to feature photos by Chronicle Books.

Captivating case files of the wedding photo detective

Captivating case files of the wedding photo detective

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-8882435/Found-abandoned-charity-shops-old-wedding-snaps-hold-host-secrets.html

  • Charlotte Sibtain, 33,  has more than  400  snapshots of strangers’ weddings
  • She has collected them from antique shops, car boot sales and markets
  • Her work has uncovered stories ranging from lifelong friendship to infidelity and even murder 

Like many former brides, Charlotte Sibtain has a number of beautiful wedding photographs dotted around her London home.

Black and white, and in all shapes and sizes, they compose a striking montage of a day which, traditionally, is the happiest of a couple’s life.

Charlotte, 33, has been married for four years but none of these photographs is of her own nuptials.

Instead, they are snapshots of strangers’ weddings — more than 400 in total — which she has lovingly collected from antique shops, car boot sales and markets over the years.

Sonya Diana Fleur Paynter on her wedding day, at St Peter's Eaton Square on December 1959. Pictured with stepfather Paull Hill

Sonya Diana Fleur Paynter on her wedding day, at St Peter’s Eaton Square on December 1959. Pictured with stepfather Paull Hill

But Charlotte does not see them as people she has never met. ‘I may not know them, but to me they’re still special,’ she says.

‘They’ve got married, they’ve got dressed up. Then these pictures have been tossed away and discarded.

‘So I try to rescue them, look after them and then, in an ideal world, give them back to their families.’

Charlotte’s hobby has led to her being dubbed ‘the wedding detective’.

No wonder, considering her painstaking sleuthing has resulted in many a discarded album being re-united with delighted relatives.

Her work has uncovered some heart-warming — and in some cases eye-popping — stories, ranging from lifelong friendship to infidelity and even murder and led to her becoming the subject of a three-part series on Radio 4.

‘What I love about wedding photographs and albums is that behind these individuals from decades ago are people we can all identify with — the slightly odd uncle, the grumpy bridesmaid, the over-enthusiastic mother of the bride,’ Charlotte says.

‘I also like the fact that when you look at the photographs you can tell what has been going on during that period — in wartime you can see evidence of rationing and the dress fabric is more make-do.’

Brought up in Brighton alongside her older sister, Charlotte has always had a lifelong love of history courtesy of her parents, who worked in education and were avid antique collectors.

She was raised in a house she describes as ‘stuffed to the rafters’ with everything from ancient ice skates to old cameras and sewing machines, and spent many happy hours as a child at antique markets and car boot sales — a hobby she carried into adulthood.

Charlotte Sibtain has a number of beautiful wedding photographs dotted around her home

Charlotte Sibtain has a number of beautiful wedding photographs dotted around her home

Her unusual collection was kick-started 15 years ago, when, then aged 18, Charlotte found a small stack of black-and-white wedding photographs nestled between some 1970s postcards in a dusty corner of an antique market in her home town.

‘They were simple examples of 1940s and 1950s weddings and very typical of the time — you could even say they were unremarkable,’ she says.

 ‘But to me, it felt each one was unique and special: the dresses, the flowers, the venues, the guests. Each picture told its own personal story.’

Moreover, coming from a family where photos are treasured and kept in ‘countless’ albums, she was saddened by the way these pictures had been cast adrift.

‘I thought it was such a shame that they’d ended up discarded in their box somewhere, unappreciated and not looked at,’ she recalled.

‘So I bought three and framed them and put them up on my wall.’

Little did she know it would be the start of a longstanding passion: Charlotte now has hundreds of vintage photographs and wedding albums in her South-East London home, hunted down from charity shops and flea markets to car boot sales.

Ranging from the 1920s to the 1960s, all human life is here, from the four large prints of a wealthy family wedding in the ‘Roaring Twenties’ — all velvet and fur and spats on the groom’s shoes — to a snapshot from a working-class wedding dated 1910 which features the family on dining-room chairs placed on a rug in the middle of the street.

Her detective work began when she realised that one of her albums, from the 1950s, had the names of the bride and groom inscribed at the front — inspiring Charlotte to track down their descendants in North London and hand it over.

‘They were stunned at first because they hadn’t seen it for more than 20 years and had no idea how it got lost, but they were so thrilled to see it,’ she recalls.

 ‘It made me think this could be a thing I could do more often. But it’s hard as often there is so little information.’

It’s certainly no easy task: often armed with little other than a hastily scribbled date or location of the wedding on the back of a photograph which has come loose from an album — or sometimes just the name of the bride or groom — Charlotte has frequently had to piece together tiny fragments of information and use her instinct.

Since that first reunion she has tracked more families, using local libraries, censuses and newspaper archives, each one with their own compelling story — although arguably none more gripping than that behind the two photographs she pulled at random from a pile earlier this year and which featured in the first episode of the three-part Radio 4 series.

Marked with the name of a local press agency, one featured the name of the wedding venue, St Peter’s Church in London’s Belgravia, while the other was inscribed on the back with the words ‘Paull’ — spelt with a distinctive two ‘ls’ — and Sonya, the ‘impossibly glamorous’ bride.

Sonya Diana Fleur Paynter on her wedding day to  Timothy (Tim)  on December 1959

Sonya Diana Fleur Paynter on her wedding day to  Timothy (Tim)  on December 1959

The photographs reeked of Hollywood glamour, and turned out to be suitably high society, the December 1959 wedding of Timothy and Sonya Bryant.

Little could Charlotte have known that from this she would uncover a trail that took her to West Cornwall and an extraordinary story involving Einstein, Marconi, landed gentry in decline, infidelity and a trial for murder.

Sonya was the granddaughter of Colonel and Ethel Paynter, who owned Boskenna House in West Cornwall, a mansion and 2,000-acre estate that became a magnet for the rich and famous in the 1920s and 1930s and which was the inspiration for author Mary Wesley’s coming-of-age novel The Camomile Lawn.

Such was Boskenna’s allure that guests as distinguished as Lawrence of Arabia, Albert Einstein and D.H. Lawrence were all drawn there, as well as the Italian radio pioneer Marconi, who is said to have fallen in love with Sonya’s mother, Betty.

Years later, Betty would be caught up in another drama when Paull Hill — her second husband and the man who had proudly walked 19-year-old Sonya down the aisle in 1959 — was charged with murdering his wife’s much younger lover.

Scandalously, aged 61, she’d started an affair with Scott Tuthill who, at 25, was 36 years her junior.

According to court reports from the time, Scott died in 1979 after he was shot in the leg by a 12-bore shotgun — fired by Paull after he tried to confront Betty at their house.

At his subsequent trial, Paull pleaded self-defence — and the jury believed him.

‘The jury was out for just an hour before the foreman gave the judge the ‘not guilty’ verdict,’ recounts Charlotte.

‘Hill walked from the dock out of the court doors. He said: ‘I would do it again without the slightest hesitation.’ ‘

The discovery left her ‘staggered’, she confides.

‘We went from a picture with little detail of a couple in a church in 1959 all the way back to the golden age of a country house in Cornwall. And then we come to a murder,’ she says.

Brian and Jean Staddon  got married at Windsor Parish Church in September 1959

So what happened to Betty’s daughter Sonya? She and her husband, Tim, had two sons, the first born a year after the wedding.

But their relationship must have broken down quickly, because Tim remarried seven years later. He died in America in 1997, aged 67. Sonya died in 1998, aged just 58.

Charlotte has since returned the photograph to Timothy and Sonya’s two sons — who didn’t want to take part in the documentary.

Not all the stories Charlotte has unravelled proved to be quite so dramatic, but they’re certainly enticing and heart-warming, like the June 1952 Deptford wedding of George and Kathleen Sewell.

Charlotte found their wedding album in a charity shop several years ago, and it has long been one of her favourites.

‘It was so lovingly put together, with these really lovely photos of this very smiley happy couple, along with some wedding telegrams and honeymoon receipts.

It gives a real sense of the couple they were,’ she says.

After sourcing their marriage certificate, Charlotte was able to ascertain that the 36-year-old bride was a nursing officer, while her older 52-year-old groom had marked his profession as ‘film director’.

‘That caught my attention,’ says Charlotte.

In fact, George was something of a pioneer: a passion for moving pictures had been forged in the unlikely setting of the World War I trenches, when, aged 18 and serving in the London Regiment, he had volunteered to play background music on the piano when a silent movie was screened for the entertainment of the troops.

By 1932, he had written the first book on amateur film-making.

The same decade, he founded the Institute of Amateur Cinematographers, an organisation that exists to this day.

The wedding of George and Kathleen Sewell in June 1952  in Deptford

‘George is dead — it seems unbelievable as he has been part of the movie-making scene as long as there has been a movie-making scene,’ the obituary reads.

‘In fact, he was the ringleader of the small group that started it way back in the 1920s.’

What’s more, some of his filmmaking also survives to this day, including a short film called The Gaiety Of Nations about the origins and effects of the Great War.

‘It was made 91 years ago but shows real expertise and love of the medium,’ says Charlotte. ‘It was spine-tingling watching it.’

After the war, George became a journalist and professional director, while he and Kathleen continued to live in the Middlesex home they moved into when they married.

Sadly, as the couple had no children, following Kathleen’s death in 2013 there was no one to take ownership of their album which, like so many others, was likely to have been lost through house clearance.

Unable to find any living relatives, Charlotte ultimately handed the album over to the Institute of Amateur Cinematographers.

‘It felt like the right place to go and I think George in particular would have been pleased,’ she says.

She found a home, too, for the wedding album of Brian and Jean Staddon, who had married at Windsor Parish Church in September 1959 and whose pictures had been taken by a well-known local photographer Kingsley Jones — a useful starting point for research.

Like Kathleen and George, the couple had no children, but after learning that Brian had died in Weymouth in 2017, Charlotte contacted the funeral directors who had organised his funeral and were put in touch with Philip and Maureen de Havilland, who had overseen the arrangements and turned out to be the couple’s best friends of 40 years standing.

Charlotte learned the story of their enduring friendship, which started in 1977 when Brian and Philip both started work as prison officers at a prison in Portland.

The couples loved to socialise together, while Jean and Brian had lovingly adopted the role of godparents to two of the de Havillands’ daughters.

 ‘Jean had made both their wedding cakes and decorated their wedding car,’ says Charlotte.

It was the de Havillands whom Jean asked to accompany her and Brian on a valedictory cruise on the QE2 after learning in 2006 she had terminal stomach cancer and, following her death the following year, the de Havillands continued to look after her widower.

‘They were best friends who were more like family,’ says Charlotte.

‘Brian and Jean just came across as lovely ordinary people who were so in love with each other until the end — and giving their friends their wedding album felt like the right thing to do.

And while she confides that parting with her photographs can be difficult, she hopes nonetheless to do it many more times in the future.

‘You do become attached,’ she admits. ‘At the same time, I don’t think of myself as their owner but their custodian.’

With the rapid advance of technology there is, of course, every chance that in due course the wedding album could become a thing of the past, as young newlyweds increasingly place their memories on their laptops and mobile phones.

‘It kills me to say it but there is definitely less emphasis on albums — although I think people still like to have a framed photograph or two in their home,’ Charlotte says.

Either way, she has one message for those newlyweds picking up their prints from the developer.

‘I really encourage everybody to label their photos,’ she says. ‘One day someone will thank you for it.’

The second of three parts of The Wedding Detectives can be heard on Radio 4 today at 11am.

 Last week’s episode can be found on BBC Sounds.

Young YouTube influencers are increasingly marketing junk food to fellow kid

From CNN/ By Ryan Prior

https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/26/health/youtube-influencers-junk-food-wellness/index.html

Popular YouTube videos made by influencers often include product placement of unhealthy foods, blurring the line between advertisement and entertainment.

(CNN)Kid influencers on YouTube are marketing junk food and sugary beverages to their fellow kids, and they’re racking up billions of page views, according to a new study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics.

The study demonstrates how advertisers are seeking to take advantage of new avenues to market their wares to children.
“We should approach YouTube influencer videos with skepticism, even with videos that seem to be educational or kid-friendly,” said senior author Marie Bragg, an assistant professor of public health nutrition with joint appointments at New York University’s School of Global Public Health and Langone Medical Center.
The researchers analyzed videos posted by the five most-watched kid influencers on YouTube in 2019. The influencers were between the ages of 3 and 14. The study team noted whether the influencers played with toys or consumed food, such as McDonald’s meals, keeping tabs on the amount of time they spent on a given activity.
Of the 418 YouTube videos that fell within their search criteria, the researchers found that 179 of the videos featured food or drinks, with 90% of those instances showing unhealthy branded items, such as fast food.
Those specific YouTube videos were viewed more than a billion times.

A new kind of marketing

Keeping track of what types of food advertising children are exposed to is important. That’s because dietary habits during childhood can have a significant effect on their likelihood of their becoming obese or developing cardiovascular disease and Type 2 diabetes later in life, according to past research.
And while much food advertising takes place on television, companies have increasingly turned to the growing audiences on social media sites such as YouTube.
One of the most important aspects of the study, Bragg said, was simply bringing attention to the fact that YouTube’s most popular under-18 hosts are frequently promoting products directly, and kids are often glued to the message.
“This kind of marketing is uncharted territory for families and researchers,” she said. Parents “may think they’re setting their kids down to watch another kid play in their backyard,” not children promoting Chicken McNuggets for a fee.
That’s particularly true during the pandemic with parents turning to screen time to keep kids occupied when there are fewer in-person activities and parents are working from home.
“Child exposure to unhealthy food, beverage, and other content on YouTube needs to be regulated,” said Dr. Jenny Radesky, lead author of the American Academy of Pediatrics policy statement on digital advertising to children, via email. “‘Host-selling’ — the practice of trusted characters promoting products within their own videos — needs to stop on YouTube, because it’s not allowed on TV.” Radesky was not involved in the study.
One major type of YouTube influencer video, which can feature food, is the phenomenon known as “unboxing videos,” in which people open up boxes of products while they narrate or comment on what they’re doing. The videos can blur the line between a product review and advertising outright.
“While the adult digital ecosystem is driven by ad revenue and persuasive design, that doesn’t mean that children’s digital spaces should be,” added Radesky, who is also an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Michigan. “We need a new children’s design code of ethics in the US.”
One popular YouTube channel, Ryan’s World, which was one of the five major influencer channels featured in the study, boasts more than 26 million subscribers. It features videos with food and stars a young boy who frequently plays with toys on screen.
“Parents shouldn’t allow their children to watch unboxing videos or other influencer content,” said Josh Golin, executive director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, via e-mail.
“Young children view the stars of these videos as peers and friends and don’t understand that the reason YouTube stars like Ryan are so enthusiastic about products featured in there is because they are stealth marketers.”
These videos can be particularly successful because viewers feel as though they have a personal or friendly relationship with the star.
“Research shows that kids who watch these videos are more likely to nag their parents for products — and throw a tantrum if they say no — than if they watch traditional TV commercials,” Golin said.
The emerging awareness around YouTube influencers and food product placement in their videos could stoke change in the industry, as stars continue cultivating their relationship with their fans.
“Ryan’s World cares deeply about the well-being of our viewers and their health and safety is a top priority for us,” said Susan Yin, a spokesperson for Sunlight Entertainment, the production company for Ryan’s World, via email.
“As such, we strictly follow all platforms terms of service, as well as any guidelines set forth by the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) and laws and regulations at the federal, state, and local levels.”
She said that Ryan’s World “welcomes” the new study from the American Academy of Pediatrics.
“As we continue to evolve our content we look forward to ways we might work together in the future to benefit the health and safety of our audience,” Yin said.
In a statement, a YouTube spokesperson noted that the company has invested significantly in the creation of the YouTube Kids app, which does not allow paid promotional content and has clear guidelines that restrict categories such as food and beverage from advertising on the app.
The spokesperson also pointed to the terms of service for the main YouTube app, which state that children must always have permission from their parent or guardian before using the service.
CNN also reached out to McDonald’s and SNAC International, the leading trade association for the snack industry. (“SNAC” stands for snacking, nutrition, and convenience.)

A new law to protect children

The Federal Trade Commission and state authorities should strengthen regulations concerning product placement on YouTube videos that feature young children, the NYU researchers argued.
The FTC expects “disclosures of material connections to the extent food companies are sponsoring influencers,” said Nicole Drayton, an agency spokesperson, adding that in order to monitor their children’s online behaviors,” parents should use whatever parental controls that are available to them.”
Bragg also pointed to the Kids Internet Design and Safety Act; the legislation was introduced by Democratic US Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts and US Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut in March.
The legislation would build on protections in the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, passed in 1998, before the rise of YouTube and other online platforms such as TikTok and Snapchat.
The bill seeks to protect children from the effects of influencer marketing as well as design features such as auto-play, which can increase the amount of time kids spend on screens or using apps.
The KIDS Act would ban auto-play settings and push alerts on sites frequented by kids and teens. And it would prohibit websites from promoting unboxing videos or content in which hosts sell products to children. The bill would also make it illegal for sites to recommend content to kids or young teens involving nicotine, tobacco or alcohol.
Those new regulations would be particularly important in helping communities historically at risk of exposure to advertising of junk food and sugary beverages, as well as the long-term health risks those products can pose.
Although the researchers didn’t focus on how the food and beverage product placement affects dietary choices, they called for more research on it.
“Companies consider Black youth as cultural trend setters,” Bragg said. “They purposely target Black youth with these sorts of products.”
Whenever possible, she recommended that parents limit the amount of time their children spend watching YouTube, even for content that appears to be kid-friendly or educational. And Bragg argued that pediatricians can help inform parents about the ways marketing can be disguised as entertainment.
“If your child uses YouTube or YouTube Kids,” Radesky said, “know that they are going to be the target of a lot of marketing they probably won’t understand. They might be highly influenced by favorite YouTubers, and not realize their favorite videos are essentially commercials. Help them be more savvy.”

Captivating case files of the wedding photo detective

Captivating case files of the wedding photo detective

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-8882435/Found-abandoned-charity-shops-old-wedding-snaps-hold-host-secrets.html

  • Charlotte Sibtain, 33,  has more than  400  snapshots of strangers’ weddings
  • She has collected them from antique shops, car boot sales and markets
  • Her work has uncovered stories ranging from lifelong friendship to infidelity and even murder 

Like many former brides, Charlotte Sibtain has a number of beautiful wedding photographs dotted around her London home.

Black and white, and in all shapes and sizes, they compose a striking montage of a day which, traditionally, is the happiest of a couple’s life.

Charlotte, 33, has been married for four years but none of these photographs is of her own nuptials.

Instead, they are snapshots of strangers’ weddings — more than 400 in total — which she has lovingly collected from antique shops, car boot sales and markets over the years.

Sonya Diana Fleur Paynter on her wedding day, at St Peter’s Eaton Square on December 1959. Pictured with stepfather Paull Hill

But Charlotte does not see them as people she has never met. ‘I may not know them, but to me they’re still special,’ she says.

‘They’ve got married, they’ve got dressed up. Then these pictures have been tossed away and discarded.

‘So I try to rescue them, look after them and then, in an ideal world, give them back to their families.’

Charlotte’s hobby has led to her being dubbed ‘the wedding detective’.

No wonder, considering her painstaking sleuthing has resulted in many a discarded album being re-united with delighted relatives.

Her work has uncovered some heart-warming — and in some cases eye-popping — stories, ranging from lifelong friendship to infidelity and even murder and led to her becoming the subject of a three-part series on Radio 4.

‘What I love about wedding photographs and albums is that behind these individuals from decades ago are people we can all identify with — the slightly odd uncle, the grumpy bridesmaid, the over-enthusiastic mother of the bride,’ Charlotte says.

‘I also like the fact that when you look at the photographs you can tell what has been going on during that period — in wartime you can see evidence of rationing and the dress fabric is more make-do.’

Brought up in Brighton alongside her older sister, Charlotte has always had a lifelong love of history courtesy of her parents, who worked in education and were avid antique collectors.

She was raised in a house she describes as ‘stuffed to the rafters’ with everything from ancient ice skates to old cameras and sewing machines, and spent many happy hours as a child at antique markets and car boot sales — a hobby she carried into adulthood.

Charlotte Sibtain has a number of beautiful wedding photographs dotted around her home

Her unusual collection was kick-started 15 years ago, when, then aged 18, Charlotte found a small stack of black-and-white wedding photographs nestled between some 1970s postcards in a dusty corner of an antique market in her home town.

‘They were simple examples of 1940s and 1950s weddings and very typical of the time — you could even say they were unremarkable,’ she says.

 ‘But to me, it felt each one was unique and special: the dresses, the flowers, the venues, the guests. Each picture told its own personal story.’

Moreover, coming from a family where photos are treasured and kept in ‘countless’ albums, she was saddened by the way these pictures had been cast adrift.

‘I thought it was such a shame that they’d ended up discarded in their box somewhere, unappreciated and not looked at,’ she recalled.

‘So I bought three and framed them and put them up on my wall.’

Little did she know it would be the start of a longstanding passion: Charlotte now has hundreds of vintage photographs and wedding albums in her South-East London home, hunted down from charity shops and flea markets to car boot sales.

Ranging from the 1920s to the 1960s, all human life is here, from the four large prints of a wealthy family wedding in the ‘Roaring Twenties’ — all velvet and fur and spats on the groom’s shoes — to a snapshot from a working-class wedding dated 1910 which features the family on dining-room chairs placed on a rug in the middle of the street.

Her detective work began when she realised that one of her albums, from the 1950s, had the names of the bride and groom inscribed at the front — inspiring Charlotte to track down their descendants in North London and hand it over.

‘They were stunned at first because they hadn’t seen it for more than 20 years and had no idea how it got lost, but they were so thrilled to see it,’ she recalls.

 ‘It made me think this could be a thing I could do more often. But it’s hard as often there is so little information.’

It’s certainly no easy task: often armed with little other than a hastily scribbled date or location of the wedding on the back of a photograph which has come loose from an album — or sometimes just the name of the bride or groom — Charlotte has frequently had to piece together tiny fragments of information and use her instinct.

Since that first reunion she has tracked more families, using local libraries, censuses and newspaper archives, each one with their own compelling story — although arguably none more gripping than that behind the two photographs she pulled at random from a pile earlier this year and which featured in the first episode of the three-part Radio 4 series.

Marked with the name of a local press agency, one featured the name of the wedding venue, St Peter’s Church in London’s Belgravia, while the other was inscribed on the back with the words ‘Paull’ — spelt with a distinctive two ‘ls’ — and Sonya, the ‘impossibly glamorous’ bride.

Sonya Diana Fleur Paynter on her wedding day to  Timothy (Tim)  on December 1959

The photographs reeked of Hollywood glamour, and turned out to be suitably high society, the December 1959 wedding of Timothy and Sonya Bryant.

Little could Charlotte have known that from this she would uncover a trail that took her to West Cornwall and an extraordinary story involving Einstein, Marconi, landed gentry in decline, infidelity and a trial for murder.

Sonya was the granddaughter of Colonel and Ethel Paynter, who owned Boskenna House in West Cornwall, a mansion and 2,000-acre estate that became a magnet for the rich and famous in the 1920s and 1930s and which was the inspiration for author Mary Wesley’s coming-of-age novel The Camomile Lawn.

Such was Boskenna’s allure that guests as distinguished as Lawrence of Arabia, Albert Einstein and D.H. Lawrence were all drawn there, as well as the Italian radio pioneer Marconi, who is said to have fallen in love with Sonya’s mother, Betty.

Years later, Betty would be caught up in another drama when Paull Hill — her second husband and the man who had proudly walked 19-year-old Sonya down the aisle in 1959 — was charged with murdering his wife’s much younger lover.

Scandalously, aged 61, she’d started an affair with Scott Tuthill who, at 25, was 36 years her junior.

According to court reports from the time, Scott died in 1979 after he was shot in the leg by a 12-bore shotgun — fired by Paull after he tried to confront Betty at their house.

At his subsequent trial, Paull pleaded self-defence — and the jury believed him.

‘The jury was out for just an hour before the foreman gave the judge the ‘not guilty’ verdict,’ recounts Charlotte.

‘Hill walked from the dock out of the court doors. He said: ‘I would do it again without the slightest hesitation.’ ‘

The discovery left her ‘staggered’, she confides.

‘We went from a picture with little detail of a couple in a church in 1959 all the way back to the golden age of a country house in Cornwall. And then we come to a murder,’ she says.

Brian and Jean Staddon  got married at Windsor Parish Church in September 1959

So what happened to Betty’s daughter Sonya? She and her husband, Tim, had two sons, the first born a year after the wedding.

But their relationship must have broken down quickly, because Tim remarried seven years later. He died in America in 1997, aged 67. Sonya died in 1998, aged just 58.

Charlotte has since returned the photograph to Timothy and Sonya’s two sons — who didn’t want to take part in the documentary.

Not all the stories Charlotte has unravelled proved to be quite so dramatic, but they’re certainly enticing and heart-warming, like the June 1952 Deptford wedding of George and Kathleen Sewell.

Charlotte found their wedding album in a charity shop several years ago, and it has long been one of her favourites.

‘It was so lovingly put together, with these really lovely photos of this very smiley happy couple, along with some wedding telegrams and honeymoon receipts.

It gives a real sense of the couple they were,’ she says.

After sourcing their marriage certificate, Charlotte was able to ascertain that the 36-year-old bride was a nursing officer, while her older 52-year-old groom had marked his profession as ‘film director’.

‘That caught my attention,’ says Charlotte.

In fact, George was something of a pioneer: a passion for moving pictures had been forged in the unlikely setting of the World War I trenches, when, aged 18 and serving in the London Regiment, he had volunteered to play background music on the piano when a silent movie was screened for the entertainment of the troops.

By 1932, he had written the first book on amateur film-making.

The same decade, he founded the Institute of Amateur Cinematographers, an organisation that exists to this day.

The wedding of George and Kathleen Sewell in June 1952  in Deptford

‘George is dead — it seems unbelievable as he has been part of the movie-making scene as long as there has been a movie-making scene,’ the obituary reads.

‘In fact, he was the ringleader of the small group that started it way back in the 1920s.’

What’s more, some of his filmmaking also survives to this day, including a short film called The Gaiety Of Nations about the origins and effects of the Great War.

‘It was made 91 years ago but shows real expertise and love of the medium,’ says Charlotte. ‘It was spine-tingling watching it.’

After the war, George became a journalist and professional director, while he and Kathleen continued to live in the Middlesex home they moved into when they married.

Sadly, as the couple had no children, following Kathleen’s death in 2013 there was no one to take ownership of their album which, like so many others, was likely to have been lost through house clearance.

Unable to find any living relatives, Charlotte ultimately handed the album over to the Institute of Amateur Cinematographers.

‘It felt like the right place to go and I think George in particular would have been pleased,’ she says.

She found a home, too, for the wedding album of Brian and Jean Staddon, who had married at Windsor Parish Church in September 1959 and whose pictures had been taken by a well-known local photographer Kingsley Jones — a useful starting point for research.

Like Kathleen and George, the couple had no children, but after learning that Brian had died in Weymouth in 2017, Charlotte contacted the funeral directors who had organised his funeral and were put in touch with Philip and Maureen de Havilland, who had overseen the arrangements and turned out to be the couple’s best friends of 40 years standing.

Charlotte learned the story of their enduring friendship, which started in 1977 when Brian and Philip both started work as prison officers at a prison in Portland.

The couples loved to socialise together, while Jean and Brian had lovingly adopted the role of godparents to two of the de Havillands’ daughters.

 ‘Jean had made both their wedding cakes and decorated their wedding car,’ says Charlotte.

It was the de Havillands whom Jean asked to accompany her and Brian on a valedictory cruise on the QE2 after learning in 2006 she had terminal stomach cancer and, following her death the following year, the de Havillands continued to look after her widower.

‘They were best friends who were more like family,’ says Charlotte.

‘Brian and Jean just came across as lovely ordinary people who were so in love with each other until the end — and giving their friends their wedding album felt like the right thing to do.

And while she confides that parting with her photographs can be difficult, she hopes nonetheless to do it many more times in the future.

‘You do become attached,’ she admits. ‘At the same time, I don’t think of myself as their owner but their custodian.’

With the rapid advance of technology there is, of course, every chance that in due course the wedding album could become a thing of the past, as young newlyweds increasingly place their memories on their laptops and mobile phones.

‘It kills me to say it but there is definitely less emphasis on albums — although I think people still like to have a framed photograph or two in their home,’ Charlotte says.

Either way, she has one message for those newlyweds picking up their prints from the developer.

‘I really encourage everybody to label their photos,’ she says. ‘One day someone will thank you for it.’

The second of three parts of The Wedding Detectives can be heard on Radio 4 today at 11am.

 Last week’s episode can be found on BBC Sounds.

Winners of the 2020 Aerial Photography Awards Highlight Beauty Seen From the Sky

Winners of the 2020 Aerial Photography Awards Highlight Beauty Seen From the Sky

时尚艺术慈善夜于上海新天地朗廷酒店温情举行 后疫情时代时尚的责任、艺术的力量、人心的温暖

(上海,2020年10月24日) 2020年以不平凡的方式开启,给予了我们重新思考的机会。而上海新天地朗庭酒店,在经过时间的洗礼与沉淀,优雅迈入第十年。在这不平凡的时刻,上海新天地朗廷酒店携手上海新天地在官方指导单位上海时装周全力支持下,携手具有世界价值观的中国艺术家们打造“时尚艺术慈善月”,以五场不同主题的创意线下活动与世界无界相连,在疫情期间以中国艺术家与时尚领袖为代表,传达艺术与时尚蕴涵的正能量,诠释国粹文化。10月24日,随着时尚艺术慈善夜的成功举办,为期近一个月的时尚艺术慈善之旅在众多行业领袖以及慈善伙伴的见证下温情落幕。

五场主题活动聚焦时尚艺术  诠释世界沟通无界

时尚艺术慈善月的五场主题活动分别与四位不同类型的艺术家携手举办。知名高定时装设计师陈野槐 Grace Chen 2020年10月8日至10月10日期间展出“Unity 融”系列,穿越地域将「摩登敦煌」的大秀带到上海时尚地标新天地,传递出中西合璧、大气优雅的风格,在其三天的私享走秀期间,Grace Chen品牌向上海愿望成真慈善基金会 (Make A Wish)积极奉献爱心,为整个月的慈善活动拉开序幕。极具东方特色的全球影响力时尚博主Wenjun以其独特的魅力联动国际品牌,在上海新天地朗廷酒店展开为期两天以「世界跨界之旅」为主题的媒体、买手、粉丝见面会,分享其独特的时尚哲学以及作为知名博主传递正能量的责任感。

才华横溢的时尚摄影师LIN以其细腻的拍摄手法,时尚的视角将疫情期间一群中国艺术家及时尚领袖在疫情期间震慑心灵的动人故事以细腻的镜头形象生动地诠释,一场精彩鲜活,充满生命力量的时尚摄影展拉开帷幕以“世界即现在”为主题,联动时尚领军人物LVMH集团大中华区总裁吴越先生、国际知名画家吕忠平老师、国际著名指挥家汤沐海老师,国际知名跨界艺术家王小慧老师、知名高定时装设计师陈野槐(Grace Chen)女士、钢琴家宋思衡老师、新锐钢琴演奏家万捷旎、流行音乐歌手,音乐制作人刘力扬、青年新锐艺术家朱丽晴以及上海新天地朗廷酒店董事总经理侯乐邦 (Robert C. Hauck) 先生合作。

朱丽晴则以在疫情期间传递正能量的灵感呈现其全新创作「献」,致敬所有抗疫英雄,竞标认购后所得金额将全数捐赠给本次活动慈善伙伴品牌的上海愿望成真慈善基金会 (Make A Wish)。毕业于耶鲁大学的新锐钢琴家万捷旎以2020疫情期间的领悟及动人故事谱写成专属的灵魂钢琴曲,在现场演绎音乐的无穷治愈力量,以音符表达正能量与生命的希望。

缘起公益,为更多许愿儿童的愿望付出力量的群星之夜

时尚艺术慈善夜于2020年10月24日在上海新天地朗廷酒店温情举办,其宗旨在为疫情后期,积极投入公益慈善事业且做出贡献的艺术家及时尚领袖打造共襄盛举的盛典,传递分享此刻的积极态度与正能量,为慈善伙伴上海愿望成真慈善基金会 (Make A Wish)给予更大的支持,为许愿儿童的愿望付出努力。

在活动现场,各界艺术翘楚,时尚领袖、精英企业及名人贵宾共聚,荣耀时刻,带来了一场耳目一新的盛典,「摩登敦煌」高定走秀、万捷旎2020疫情音乐日记演奏、慈善表彰以及刘力扬公益主题曲《WORK for Light》特别演出,精彩生动地诠释了艺术与时尚给人们的生活带来的美好希望,这为正在经历疫情考验和挑战的人们,带来正面的希望与能量。

2020“时尚艺术慈善月”诠释后疫情时代时尚的责任、艺术的力量、人心的温暖

在2020年这样特殊的时刻,时尚艺术慈善月收获了各界的全力支持,包括上海时装周、上海新天地、协办单位欣翰国际文化传媒(Dream Worker Communications)、战略合作伙伴1664、指定合作单位毛戈平、阿斯顿马丁 (Aston Martin)、Sephora、两两(Leanon)的鼎力支持,这些企业努力在践行企业社会责任,共同诠释世界沟通无界的理念。

Meet the first woman to run for president

Meet the first woman to run for president

The hill/ by Morgan Chalfant

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/518301-meet-the-first-woman-to-run-for-president

© Library of Congress

The first woman to formally declare herself a candidate for president of the United States did not build a national campaign or make a splash in debates. In fact, when Victoria Woodhull ran for office in 1872, she could not even vote for herself.

Woodhull, an unconventional social reformer who advocated for “free love” and women’s suffrage, was nominated to run for president by the newly established Equal Rights Party. Her run came decades before the ratification of the 19th Amendment that gave women the right to vote.

Born Victoria Claflin, she came from humble roots in Homer, Ohio. She received essentially no formal education, though she and her sister Tennessee Claflin worked as traveling medical clairvoyants.

Woodhull fell ill at the age of 14 and eventually married the man who treated her, Canning Woodhull, when she was 15. He was her first of three husbands, one who didn’t bother to stop womanizing.

“She was fully aware at that time that there were men who had affairs like her husband and women were just stuck,” said Teri Finneman, an associate professor in the University of Kansas’s school of journalism and author of “Press Portrayals of Women Politicians.” “She found that to be grossly unfair and hypocritical, and that would help to greatly influence her views during the campaign.”

Woodhull and her sister established a relationship with Cornelius Vanderbilt, a wealthy railroad magnate, through their work as traveling clairvoyants. With his backing, they settled in New York in the 1860s and together started the first female-run stock brokerage company, which attracted plenty of press coverage and brought her to the attention of suffrage advocates.

The sisters used money they earned from the firm to establish a women’s rights and reform newspaper, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, which published the first English translation of “The Communist Manifesto” and served as an outlet for discussion of women’s suffrage and other issues. The newspaper advocated for issues like a single moral standard for the sexes and legalizing prostitution.

Woodhull became an unusual and prominent advocate for women’s suffrage at the height of her public career, which paved the way for her run for president.

She became the first woman to address a House committee on Jan. 11, 1871, delivering a speech before the House Judiciary Committee about women’s suffrage.

Woodhull, joined by famed women’s suffrage advocates Susan B. Anthony and Isabella Beecher Hooker, argued in her address that the 14th and 15th amendments implicitly afforded women the right to vote. She implored the committee to draft legislation giving women the right to vote, but they rejected her appeal.

Woodhull clashed with more conservative suffrage advocates like Anthony, who found Woodhull’s ideals too liberal.

Woodhull was nominated for president by the Equal Rights Party to run against incumbent Republican Ulysses Grant and Horace Greely, the Democratic nominee, in 1872. The party platform covered a range of issues, including abolishing monopolies, a single form of currency, an end to war, direct and equal taxation, help for the unemployed and free trade.

“While others of my sex devoted themselves to a crusade against the laws that shackle the women of the country, I asserted my individual independence; while others prayed for the good time coming, I worked for it; while others argued the equality of woman with man, I proved it by successfully engaging in business; while others sought to show that there was no valid reason why woman should be treated socially and politically as a being inferior to man, I boldly entered the arena of politics and business and exercised the rights I already possessed,” Woodhull wrote in a letter to the editor published in the New York Herald announcing her candidacy.

“I therefore claim the right to speak for the unenfranchised women of the country,” she wrote.

Abolitionist Frederick Douglass was nominated as Woodhull’s running mate, though he did not accept.

Woodhull did not win any electoral votes, but her run represented a step forward for women seeking a seat at the table in politics.

“I think it did send a signal to political elites and members of our political institutions that this was an issue they would need to address,” said Jennifer Lawless, a politics professor at the University of Virginia. “Questions of women’s political inclusion were not only going to be about the right to vote.”

The press coverage of her presidential run was overwhelmingly critical. Cartoonist Thomas Nast depicted Woodhull in demonic garb and labeled her “Mrs. Satan.”

“Being the first is always difficult, and so the fact that she did that, that she put herself out there, she definitely put the crack in the ceiling,” said Finneman. “What is frustrating today is how some of that same media vilification that she faced in 1872 has continued to be a thread in culture and media coverage of women even to this day.”

Finneman pointed to the coverage of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential run and of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin when she was chosen as Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) running mate in 2008.

Woodhull is not typically listed among the names of prominent women’s rights advocates in present day, and experts say she has been overlooked likely because of her unconventional background and embrace of some controversial ideas.

In the waning days of her presidential campaign, Woodhull found herself embroiled in controversy. She and her sister were arrested three days before Election Day and thrown in New York City jail on obscenity charges for publishing a report in their newspaper about an alleged affair between Rev. Henry Ward Beecher and a married parishioner.

They were acquitted after several months of litigation, but Woodhull spent Election Day in prison, preventing her from any attempt at casting a ballot for herself.

Woodhull eventually sought a new start with her sister in England, after divorcing her second husband in 1876. She married an English banker in 1883 and went on to publish a number of works, including the magazine Humanitarian, which was focused on eugenics.

She died in England in 1927, at the age of 88.