Artist Photographs Smoking Children To Show How Adults Influence Them

Look at these children! “Smoking Kids” is a project by photographer Frieke Janssens. She took children aged four to nine, and dressed them up as adult stereotypes… and gave them smokes. Well, not real ones – it's all chalk or cheese sticks and smoke from incense – but it looks realistic enough.

Janssens was inspired by a video of a smoking Indonesian 2-year-old and she wanted to draw attention to the differences between smoking in western and eastern cultures. “The aesthetics of smoke and the particular way smokers gesticulate with their hands and posture cannot be denied,” Janssens wrote on her website. “but among the different tribes of 'Smoking Kids,' - Glamour, Jazz, and The Marginal - there is a nod to less attractive aspects, on the line between the beauty and ugliness of smoking.”

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