Cigarette No. 98, New York

When Irving Penn (known for his stunning photographs for Vogue of exquisite models in couture garments) first exhibited his photographs of cigarette butts at the Marlborough Gallery in New York City in 1977, the Cigarettes were met with incomprehension. Why make achingly beautiful prints of something beneath regard? Two decades earlier, in the 1950s when smoking was socially acceptable, Penn had made portraits of people smoking and ads for cigarettes. But privately he abhorred smoking and sympathized with the American Cancer Society’s war against Big Tobacco. The attitude toward smoking was but one of the beliefs in major upheaval during the 1960s and early 1970s. The brutality of the race riots and of the war in Vietnam revealed a national moral emergency, also evident locally in a New York City wracked with crime, strewn with debris, and on the brink of bankruptcy.

It was against this background that Penn learned in 1971 that his mentor and father figure, Alexey Brodovitch—who was never without a cigarette—had died of cancer. Less than year later, Penn began a new project: collecting decaying cigarette butts from the city’s streets and carefully recording them in his studio where these shards of civilization from the gutter took on greater resonance. Laying them out to be photographed, Penn saw their uncanny relationships to individuals and, gathered together, to a nation undone by corporate and government irresponsibility. Printed large and in platinum and palladium metals, these fragile remnants of momentary pleasures internalize the miseries of the age and, in Zen-like fashion, reconcile the base and the beautiful.