Faculty of Art

Photography

Yasmine Irani

04. Ephemeral Everlasting

The haunting aspect of smoking and how it affects my father is something that I carry with me on a daily basis and I think dwelling on it and trying to present that in my art would just impact myself negatively, both emotionally and mentally. I decided to take back some of this power that cigarettes have over me emotionally and create instead a series of photographs of the cigarettes not in use, mostly post-use or mid-use+abandoned, in a visually pleasing way. I still make reference to some statistics with the 2 photos that have a coloured component. The one with the alcohol makes reference to the statistic that 70% of alcohol abusers are also heavy smokers; alcoholics are more prone to turn to cigarettes, but it doesn’t apply the other way around. The other image with the lipstick mark is to make reference to the fact that women are also smokers. You don’t see it mentioned too often that women smoke, almost 1 in 8 women do.The reason why I called the project Ephemeral Everlasting is because that word “ephemeral” applies heavily to cigarettes as they don’t last too long, however this contradicts the nature of cigarettes. While smoking one doesn’t last too long, the internal effects last forever (hence the word everlasting). Even if someone only smokes 1 for the first time, there's the possibility of going back to it and smoking more and more to the point where they’re also addicted (once again capturing this everlasting effect they have on you).