While the title for this post could be interpreted in more than one way, I’ll restrict myself to the one that involves cigarettes. In North America, I’m amazed at how little traction the whole “cigarettes guarantee cancer” message has gained. To be honest, I’m not amazed at all. I come from a city that elected a mayor they knew was a crack-smoking imbecile. And the nation immediately to the south of me is poised to elect a leader who is willing to stand by any claim no matter how outrageous. So the hope that humans are capable of reasoned choices seems to have vanished … in a puff of smoke.
Even so, I wonder if maybe cigarettes have a different cultural meaning in places like Singapore and Hong Kong. Rather than the West’s collective Oppositional Defiance Disorder, maybe there’s a certain je ne sais quoi that people like me can’t access. Maybe in Singapore, where mall culture thrives, people are so smitten by high fashion and images of glamour, that cigarette poses have become second nature. Maybe there’s a fatalism in Hong Kong: with so much particulate matter in the air, cigarettes don’t make an appreciable difference. But I speculate. The most I can say for certain is that I could spend a lifetime in any large Asian city photographing people smoking cigarettes.
