Five-year-old Ardian Azka Mubarok smokes at his home on March 27, 2015.

Perhaps you’ll recall that viral video a few years back of an obese Indonesian toddler chain-smoking cigarettes like a nicotine fiend. Some found it “funny” to see such a young kid puffing away like an old pro. Others were shocked and appalled. I mean, how could a toddler be a chainsmoker?! But the thing is, apparenlty seeing young children smoking is a very common sight in Indonesia and “public-health activists describe the country as a ‘playground’ for big tobacco companies like Philip Morris, which makes the country’s No. 2 cigarette.”

Young smokers begin the cycle of addiction but at a health cost for generations to come. The juxtaposition of young boys smoking like seasoned addicts is jarring yet this project is intended to not only shock and inform viewers but to demonstrate the lack of enforcement of national health regulations and to question the country’s dated relationship with tobacco.

Photographer Michelle Siu captured this dark phenomenon with photographs. The series is called “Marlboro Boys.”

Students on a public bus.
 

Five-year-old Ardian Azka Mubarok easily purchases a cigarette which he will smoke near his home.
 

Eman smokes while clutching a bag of juice.
 
More after the jump…

 
The term ‘Blaxploitation’ was coined by NAACP head/film publicist Junius Griffin in the early 1970s to describe the genre of African American action films that followed from the examples set by Cotton Comes to Harlem and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, but the term certainly could have had other applications—racially targeted marketing that sought to move destructive commodities like malt liquor and menthol cigarettes to underclass populations has long been, and justifiably remains, a highly contentious matter, and is inarguably more literally exploitative than any “exploitation” film. Flashbak.com compiled a lode of eye-popping examples from a print campaign for Winston cigarettes.

After World War Two American tobacco companies started to explore new markets to maintain their not insubstantial prosperity. The growth in urban migration and the growing incomes of African Americans (called at the time the “emerging Negro market”) gave the tobacco companies what was sometimes called an “export market at home”. Additionally, a new kind of media started to appear after the war when several glossy monthly magazines including Negro Digest (1942, renamed Black World), Ebony (1945) and Negro Achievements (1947, renamed Sepia) began to be published.

These relatively expensively produced magazines were far more attractive to the tobacco advertisers than the cheap ‘negro’ daily newspapers of the pre-war era, with glossy pages and a far wider national distribution. The magazines meant for a purely African American audience also meant that advertisers could produce adverts aimed and featuring African Americans away from the eyes of white consumers.

 

“Rich.” “Long.” Got’cha. Wink wink.

The juxtaposition of aspirational fashion, rogue-ish male confidence, and burning cigarettes carries an unmistakable message so old it’s hardly worth spelling out. The longing looks from the women in the near-backgrounds aren’t terribly nuanced in their subtext, either. But all the problematics of death-dealing aside, these are objectively awesome photos, amazing snapshots of a time and place when African American culture was asserting a more prominent place in the US mainstream. Airbrush out the cigarettes (or don’t) and change the captions, and these would be amazing menswear ads, too.
 

 

 
More after the jump…

Anti-smoking advertisement, Finland
 
With all due respect to those who struggle with nicotine addiction (especially my good pal, the “indestructible” Lemmy Kilmister), these anti-smoking advertisements make me wish I never smoked for the week or so that I did back when I was fifteen.
 

Hi, Hitler! Anti-smoking advertisement, India
 
Unless you don’t watch television or read print media (which is of course plausible), then you may not be aware of how much anti-smoking crusaders have stepped up their campaign to raise awareness of the dangers of smoking, and to help people quit. Television ads featuring graphic testimonies and images of former smokers that have lost limbs, lips and teeth thanks to their habit are now commonplace. It’s no longer legal to smoke in clubs or bars in many places in the U.S. and starting on October 1st of this year, it will no longer be legal to smoke in your car in England or Wales if a child (or anyone under 18) is present.
 

Anti-smoking advertisement, UK
 
For people that treat the world as their ashtray, while I sympathise with your plight (I’ve watched friends go through withdrawals trying to quit - it’s not pretty), I will never understand the lack of respect or empathy most smokers seem have when it comes to the environment, or deciding to light up by a public doorway, a playground full of kids, or at the damn beach. It is not my goal with this post to be judge-y of smokers. I’ll just leave you with fact that smoking is a real fucking, life sucking drag. On us all. Thought provoking NSFW images that will hopefully help you quit, follow.
 

Brazil
 
More after the jump…

 
Keeping pace with our laughably inefficient abstinence-only sex “education” program, the drug education at my school was incredibly patronizing, to say the least. For chastity, we ripped pieces of Scotch tape off of one another; the metaphor became clear as the adhesive wore off—the more you sleep around, the less likely you will ever be able to romantically bond with another human being. For the drugs though, we had a more old-fashioned scare tactics—photos of black lungs, testimonials from former addicts and alcoholics (on video of course, can’t have the kids around anyone who has ever done drugs of any kind), statistics that were obviously skewed to make a joint appear as dangerous as black tar heroin and, etc.

Obviously it was disingenuous propaganda, but it wasn’t nearly as insulting to our intelligence as Smokey Sue Smokes for Two, the fetus in a jar with a doll head that smokes. It’s apparently supposed to teach you something about fetal distress? From a health teaching tools site that sells this abomination (for $163!):

Sue’s motherly instincts are questionable at best. There she sits passively smoking cigarette after cigarette, ignorant of how her vile habit is affecting her baby. Tragically Sue personifies many real-life mothers who don’t see that their choices influence the health of their babies. As Sue smokes each cigarette tar builds up around the gaunt fetal model and gradually tints the clear fetal environment a sickly shade of amber. Sue may not be able to think for herself but she prompts others to do plenty of thinking.

Seeing as even the youngest child understands the body is more complex—and pregnancy more involved—than a plastic fetus in a jar, I can safely say I don’t see this creepy fear-doll working. (And isn’t it kind of insulting to portray a woman as a literal baby-jar?)
 

Silver Camels, 2013
Discarded Camel cigarette packages on linen
 
Probably the strangest thing about the artist Robert Larson is that none of the writeups of his work that I’ve seen bother to say whether he smokes or not. Not knowing anything else about it, I’d surmise that he does, but so much emphasis is placed on the role of “scavenging” in his work that I have to assume he does not smoke. Which is a little weird! So Larson spends hours and hours walking around his hometown of Santa Cruz, California, where he collects discarded cigarette packs and other ephemera in order to create his striking geometrical collages. It seems an intriguing variant of pop art in which the actual mass-produced product is incorporated in the art. After all, Andy Warhol didn’t use actual Brillo boxes, he made them. Larson’s cut out the middle man here.

Larson’s work is interesting because it’s almost too aesthetic and/or beautiful to land any particular point about the dangers of lung cancer, if such is even his aim. And to be honest, that’s the right approach because the links between smoking and disease are, after all, very well known. But to take such depressing subject matter and turn them into a pleasing piece of art, that’s more impressive.
 

Red Flower with Gold, 2010
Discarded cigarette packages, encaustic on linen
 

Unchained, 2013
Discarded Marlboro cigarette packages on paper
 

Green Triangles, 2012
Discarded Newport cigarette packages, encaustic on linen
 

Gold Flower with Red, 2010
Discarded cigarette packages, encaustic on linen
 

Red Honey, 2008
Discarded Marlboro cigarette packages, encaustic on linen
 

Bloom, 2012-2013
Discarded cigarette packaging on canvas
 

Meditations On Top, 1997-2007
Discarded Top rolling paper packaging on linen
 

Passage, 2011
Discarded white-generic matchbooks on linen
 

Blue Honey, 2010
Discarded Marlboro packaging on linen
 

Slow Burn, 2007
Discarded Zig Zag rolling papers on linen
 
More pretty cigaratte artworks after the jump…...

 
Cold War aside, people used to be so excited about the space program that tobacco companies tried to capitalize off of the Apollo–Soyuz Project. How things have changed!

In fact, if you’re so inclined, you can actually purchase your very own pack of dead-stock space smokes!

 
Smoking stunts your growth, but this kid goes to where the flavor is.

(via reddit)

 
This little gem caught my eye at the Everything Is Festival! over the weekend: It’s a trailer/excerpt from Joe Dante’s 4-hour long epic of found footage mayhem, The Movie Orgy (which they screened at Cinefamily yesterday). In it, you’ll see one of the best ads for cigarettes, ever. I’ll leave it at that, as not to spoil it.