![]() ![]() Before you label me with “oh, another feminazi trying to make a point”, let me explain how and why you’re completely off the point if you feel so. But when it comes to women smokers, it’s injurious to their character too. “Bigdi hui ladki!” “Characterless hai!” “Pat jaegi aasaani se!” It's something they do in-between takes, away from the prying eyes of the public.DISCLAIMER: This article is NOT a pro-smoking suggestion for women (or men). But most of them are respectful enough to keep the habit off social media. Of course they still smoke-you can catch them at fashion week and in paparazzi shots puffing away like it's 1985. I'm also not naive enough to think that celebrities and models have collectively stopped smoking. I lost a Grandmother to lung cancer and a Grandfather to a tobacco-related cancer-and I know I'm not alone in that loss. I must be forthcoming about how infuriating I find these images personally. So it’s hard not to feel baffled when you think of the significant progress we’ve made, only to have these powerhouses of social influence tear it all down. We now care about things like kale and green juice and we all know that cigarettes are poisonous. It shows that as a country, we're wising up. It's true that the overall number of tobacco users has decreased significantly over the last few decades-and that's a great thing. I never let social peer pressure be an excuse for me." I just never gave into any of that stuff. But to say these images are the catalyst that caused people to start smoking is just a flimsy excuse, he adds: "The person who started smoking after seeing these images was going to do it anyway. I am not a fan of smoking, I don't think it a good thing, obviously-my brother had to have his voice box removed," Schuman explains. "I don't think taking pictures of it glamorizes it any more than anything else. "For me, it's not really something that's an advantage in the shot." That's because the photographer has seen his fair share of nasty comments written on his Instagram page for posting images of smokers, but he says he's simply in the business of capturing a moment. They used to be able to smoke in the office but now they have to go outside and smoke," he says. "The reality is that in Europe, you can only smoke when you're outside. As arguably one of the most famous street style photographers in the world, much of Schuman's portfolio captures women mid-puff. 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. ![]() 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. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |