Up in smoke...

Imagine in 2026, a big museum puts out a press release announcing a new exhibition. The exhibition is called The Blue Haze. It is about smokers. Photographs of smokers to be exact! No? You can’t imagine it? Neither can I. But in 1964, things were different.

In 1964, drawn from a single collection, an exhibition was mounted in Germany at a reputable museum. The show was exclusively about smoking. It was a collection of photographs of smokers by some of the greatest photographers of the 20th century.

[Robert Doisneau: Tattooed man smoking, 1952]

You are now going through your mental hard drive. You are looking for photographs of smokers. Photographs made by the masters of the art….

The collector was a man named Gustav Nils Dorén. He was a graphic artist, who had a day job as a graphic designer for a tobacco company called Reemtsma. The company was huge in the years leading up to WWII and contributed greatly to Germany’s GDP. It did not hurt when back in those days, a soldier’s pay included free cigarettes! Today, Reemtsma is part of Imperial Tobacco.

Winding back the clock a bit…. I walked into a second hand books-shop, which specialised in old posters. I was in Berlin. I saw a folder on the corner of a bookcase. It contained a small stack of photographs. Each photograph was mounted on black card stock, about A4 in size.

[Henri Cartier-Bresson, Tipperary, Ireland, 1952]

I was confident one of the photographs was by Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908 - 2004). I was sure, I had seen it in some book somewhere. I also recognised a photograph by Robert Doisneau, which is a classic. I suspected two rayographs were by Man Ray…

[Man Ray: Rayograph with a cigarettes and pipe, 1924]

The photographs were inexpensive. I bought six. For easy reference, they cost me about the same as two nights hotel near Checkpoint Charlie. I should of course have bought them all, but I didn’t recognise a lot of them. I knew nothing, and the seller didn’t know much either. He told me the collection had come to him a long time ago and had been sitting in a box in his storage space. He said photography was becoming more popular in his shop, so he brought out the box.

Since then, I have done a bit of research. I found an old auction catalogue where a description read: Franca Rame with fur coat and cigarette - Wonderful original photograph. Original silver gelatin print, 1964. The print offered here comes from an exhibition of photographs at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe (Museum of Arts and Crafts), Hamburg, from March to April 1964. “The Blue Haze.” The exhibition was curated by R. E. Martinez, CAMERA-Paris, and Gustav Nils Dorén. The photograph is from the collection of Gustav Nils Dorén. I figured this had to be my exhibition! The auction listing stated: The exhibition brochure shown below is not included in the offer and is for documentation purposes only.

As you can see, the list of photographers is shown in the bottom left corner. The scan is not great, but you can make out most of them.

The exhibition was held in Hamburg. The year was 1964. It is unclear to me whether this was a publicity stunt. The cigarette maker giving back to the community… in a manner of speaking. It may well have been. However, the photographs are excellent. I did not buy the Doisneau, as I had recently learned he had staged one of his key photographs! I did pick up the Henri Cartier-Bresson above, which I found pretty quickly in a book of his photographs he had made in Ireland. And here is what I have learned about the rest….

[William Klein: Ostia Lido, 1958]

This felt like William Klein (1926 - 2022). I went down the list of photographers from the auction catalogue, and I thought it was likely his, but I could not find the image anywhere. I contacted a friend in Paris, who knows William Klein’s son. The son looks after William Klein’s archive, as he did during the last few years of the Master’s life. After a bit of back and forth, it was determined that the photograph was made in Ostia Lido in 1958. Ostia Lido is the nearest beach to Rome. It was a photograph made for, but not included in, the final edit of the William Klein’s book Roma. The book was published in 1959. One of the great books of the era. The result of Federico Fellini inviting Klein to Rome to do the book!

[Edward Quinn: Pablo Picasso at La Californie, Cannes, 1957]

Picasso sitting in an old chair wearing rather loud check trousers. It should have been easy, but it took me a while to find. I figured it was by one of the photographers who was around Picasso a lot. Lee Miller was, but shot mostly square frames. Brassai? David Douglas Duncan? Lucien Clergue? I realised that there were many photographers in the circle of Picasso. Then one day, I was looking at the work of Edward Quinn (1920 - 1997). His archive is online. I was actually looking for something else, but there they were, screaming at me. The checkered trousers. Quinn is today mostly forgotten. His celebrity photographs from the south of France are still seen from time to time, but he did so much more. Sure enough, the photograph was in his archive, which is available online. Edward Quinn made my photograph of Picasso smoking a cigarette in 1957.

The two rayographs were not hard to find. They are indeed by Man Ray (1890 - 1976). A rayograph is made by placing various objects directly on photographic paper and exposing them to light, leaving the shapes of the objects in white on a black background. Man Ray is credited with coming up with this process, to which he gave his name. Prints like these were made by producing the rayograph and then rephotographing the unique image, so that it could be printed like any other photograph.

I found the pipe image below in the collection of The Art Gallery of New South Wales, in Australia. It is in their permanent collection. Their print is from 1972, based on a negative from 1928. Obviously my print is from before 1964. I can see it is from the same negative, as there are dust spots in the negative in the same place on both photographs.

The second one, above, I also tracked down. It was made a few years before, in 1924.

[Man Ray: Rayograph with a pipe, 1928]

Finally, there is the work below, which I am very excited about. It is four strips of photographic paper, each with four photographs. I think they were contact printed, cut up and then collaged. There are some hands, which would overlap between frames, if they were straight contact prints. They were mounted side by side with a little space between them on a piece of black card. They are about the width of a film strip and 12 cm long. I put them on a white background when I scanned them to show you they are actually strips, roughly the width of a 35 mm roll of film. To me they look like they are by Man Ray, mostly because of the pipe in the corner, but also how Man Ray would have loved this type of challenge. But I don’t know. I am still exploring. Ideas of authorship are most welcome!

[Attributed (by me) to Man Ray: Smoking, before 1964]

The Blue Haze may well have been a publicity stunt on the part of the cigarette maker. I do not have much knowledge of the collector, Gustav Nils Dorén. He was a commercial artist, graphic designer. His name pops up as author of a book Das neue Tabago Buch (1985) (The New Tobacco Book), released for Reemtsma’s 75th anniversary. His name also pops up as the designer of an exhibition poster for glass by Venini and Orrefors. I have not found much else. It seems he spent a lot of his career at Reemtsma, given that he arranged the exhibition in 1964 and was still there for the anniversary book in 1985.

[Gustav Nils Dorén: Glass exhibition poster. ca 1955]

In 1964, a museum exhibition of photography would have been a very rare thing. This collection, which is now broken up, would be unlikely to appear in a gallery today. There is too much concern about smoking and the health issues related to the habit. I definitely don’t think you would see a smoking exhibition in 2026.

I have no issue hanging these photographs. I think they are great. I cannot believe the William Klein of the girl with the two cigarettes did not make the cut for the book! But, as long as the photographs don’t smell of stale tobacco, I am more than happy to hang them!

Until next time….. look in those boxes at the flea market, or in the second-hand bookshop, you never know what you might find!

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