I consulted street-style photographer Scott Schuman, better known by The Sartorialist, for his own opinion on smoking in candid and editorial images. “Cigarettes, unfortunately, have a cemented role in art and fashion–but we now have more of a responsibility to exercise restraint in deciding how and when to use them as styling props,” she explains. But the true test lies in whether the image still works without the need for smoking. "That slim curl of smoke carries your eye up or along the frame of a photo-a subtle yet stunning component of any photo's composition.” It's a mistake to remove them completely from the conversation, she says, considering they are part of some of the best photographs of all time. It's a way of saying-without actually saying it-that it's good to be a little bad," says Carrie Goldberg, ’s travel and weddings editor. “There is an inherent sex appeal in seeing someone smoking in a photograph. But some also insisted cigarettes can have an appropriate use in certain editorials that the small white stick somehow tells a story that empty fingers simply cannot. Everyone agreed that smoking is destructive (obviously), and that it's particularly bad that these starlets are apathetically projecting to the world that smoking is a habit of the well-connected and cool. When I asked my fellow editors how they felt about seeing cigarettes in fashion editorials, I was met with a mixed response. In 2015, 4.6 million middle and high school students labeled themselves current tobacco users, and e-cigarette usage is spiking among middle school students.
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And while it might seem harmless to some- It's just an image! They might not even really smoke!-it's the proliferation of this imagery that will slowly chip away at all our progress.Ī 2015 study of 200 young adults proved that exposure to depictions of cigarette-use on social media can “predict future smoking tendency, over and above the influence of TV and movie depictions of smoking.” And while smoking has declined among adolescents, the rates are still high.
The cigarettes in these Instagram images are gratuitous to the point of confusing a lazy attempt at being cool and oh-so-candid.
Cigarettes have their time and place in art-when they're needed for authenticity, like in Mad Men, or to lend a subversive quality, like in vintage fashion editorials, when we just started to know better but turned a blind eye.