Tobacco Controls

TC is a visual autoethnography of nicotine addiction, intertwining aesthetic research, historical inquiry, and social reflection. It stands as an act of personal resistance and a call to question the power of images that shape collective behaviour.

At seventeen, I began stealing cigarettes from the Marlboro packs my father left around the house. I was depressed, and smoking felt like a romantic, socially acceptable way to hurt myself.
I became captivated by the sentimental image of the cigarette, shaped by the tobacco industry in the collective imagination through advertising and films.

I have been smoking for fourteen years and have tried to quit many times without success. Nicotine has created a profound dependence in me.

To conceptually confront the object of my addiction, I dismantled a Marlboro cigarette pack into its constituent elements and digitally scanned each part.
The label Limited Edition, applied to a standardized product, guided my research toward the marketing strategies of the tobacco industry.
On another cigarette pack, an even more recent limited edition, the slogan I'm Marlboro emphasizes exclusivity and a sense of belonging to a privileged group.

In response to these strategies, I chose to cover the mandatory health warning with my own personal version. This gesture aims to provoke a less repetitive and more reflective response to the subject. It draws inspiration from a 1963 interview in Art News in which Andy Warhol, while working on his Death and Disaster series, stated: “When you see a gruesome picture over and over again, it doesn’t really have any effect.”

In contemporary times, young people continue to take up smoking for the same reasons as in the past. Yet smoking is undergoing a profound shift in cultural perception, while the tobacco industry still profits deceptively from vulnerable individuals addicted to a toxic substance like nicotine, which is not even mentioned in health warnings.

Since 2017, Philip Morris International Inc. has publicly committed to a “smoke-free” future, portraying itself as forward-looking and scientifically trustworthy. Nevertheless, its messaging is carefully crafted to appear both innovative and safe, maintaining a seductive appeal even as the company seeks to reshape its image in a world increasingly aware of the deadly consequences of smoking.

In exploring the multi-layered subject of the cigarette, I collected materials produced through a variety of techniques: scans, sometimes altered and sometimes left untouched; digital photographs; documented performances; archival images; and screenshots from Google Street View.

In Tobacco Controls (2024 — ongoing), my exploration examines how smokers have been framed by society over time, highlighting how being a smoker today can be experienced as a double burden, both in terms of health and social image.