Cigarettes: Death-Sticks or Creative Tools?

“There are two kinds of people - smokers and non-smokers. Decide which one you are, and be that.”
Robin Williams, Dead Again

I have never smoked a cigarette. No, not once, in all my forty-one years. Smoking related ills killed both my parents and I am married to a passionate anti-smoking campaigner. I have experienced the harm nicotine can do. There’s no doubt in my mind that it’s a killer. Nevertheless, I can fully understand why folks smoke, and I am pro-choice. Unlike Rich (who thinks that the smoking ban in public places is the best thing ever to happen in the UK) I actually believe that the ability to choose one’s own fate is a fundamental human right.

My mother-in-law (a breast cancer survivor) has smoked like a chimney all her life. She will never give up. “If you take away my right to smoke, then you might as well shoot me,” she says. A passionate advocate of the right to choose, she is married to a very talented painter who has produced some of his finest work with cigarette in one hand and paintbrush in the other. He is the typical stereotypical rebel artist – he rises at the crack of dawn to smoke and paint, in the silence and stillness of the early morning. It is his favourite time of day.

I know many artists who can’t do without nicotine. They use smoking as a muse to create. It relaxes them as a glass of good Pinot Noir might do to me. Contemplating life, grazing on different ideas, the artist uses the ritual of smoking to explore his imagination, as a tool to enhance his creativity.

The journalist Jonathan Jones observed that the more disreputable smoking has become, the more artists are drawn to it. Smokers have a certain “devil may care” attitude about them, a disregard for consequence. Even though they are of course aware that heavy smoking may well kill them one day, they deride scientific evidence and make light of the distant possibility of death. They believe in living for the moment and ignore the physical consequences (although they are certainly aware of them.) Stubborn libertarians to the last, they want to decide their own fate. Death under their own terms. Under these circumstances the cigarette is more than nicotine addiction, it is an emblem of mortality. A symbol of freedom. An act of defiance.

I can’t help but admire that in some way. Although the glamorous image of the cultured sophisticated smoker has long gone, the rebellious image of the lone smoking artist remains. What Rich perceives as incomprehensible defiance of scientific evidence, I see as spirited rebellion against the do-gooders, against those that dictate how people should live their lives. Do-gooders will never be associated with artistic creativity. Artists and photographers who smoke are the very essence of the James Dean rebel. They go their own way. They are attracted to smoking precisely because they are celebrating their individuality, their creativity and their culture.

To the artist who has smoked all his life, the cigarette is as essential equipment as his paintbrush or camera to his creative process. Take away his equipment, and you maim not only his ability to produce art, but part of the person within. It’s not that nicotine is essential to produce great photographs or paintings, but smoking is so much more than just a drug or an addiction. The smoking ritual is a fundamental part of the person. Ban the freedom to choose, and you lose something from both the individual and his culture.

As my mother-in-law says, “So what if it kills me? It’s who I am. It’s my choice.”



Rich would never photograph someone smoking (and he really disapproves of this blog post) so I’ve featured instead the infamous and haunting photograph of Violetta by Helmut Newton.