Thank you for Smoking

04/11/2017

© Greg Gorman, Sharon Stone, Los Angeles 1992 – Monika Mohr Galerie

‘Suddenly’, the Galerist says, „Smoking is something special, out-of-the-ordinary. I had been smoking for fifty years!“ Now they all do - again: Marlene, shot by an unknown set artist, Coco Chanel and Esther Haase´s Models - „nobody does it today!“, says Monica Mohr. And that she doesn´t „do interviews“ anymore. There is the shop-assistant at Tiffany, Fifth Avenue, nearly jumping over the counter at the inquiring European, ether they had cigarette-tips. Breakfast at Tiffany´s without one? Pardon me? So happened it 1998.
Here and now in the Hamburg of 2017, they smoke in the photographs, all of them! Stars, Actors and mere Beauties - a whiff of ols Smoking Times - even Diana Vreeland hat wineglasses full of cigarettes: “Every household had some to offer to guests”, Mohr says. Just un apercu: The last stronghold of smoking over the Atlantic was Air France 747 Paris-NYC in the bar upstairs - but of course this, too, went up in flames as the Junta of Non-Smokers took over.
Bad luck for Pina Bausch, hammering out her right to smoke in every contract and smoked like a chimney while choreographing, here she is - Sophia Loren seduces through blue clouds and Pablo Picasso and lights her up, surrounded by his young Torero friends, captured by his friend, photographer Edward Quinn.

It is a paradox indeed: Smoking is a halt in time, and now theses fleeting moments are immortalized on pictures, they themselves being a source of delight, gems of connoisseurship !

More informations at: Photography Monika Mohr Galerie