Frieke Janssens

Frieke Janssens is a Belgian photographer. I have a strong interest in one of her collections, entitled ‘The Beauty of an Ugly Addiction’. It is made up of 15 unsettling images of children puffing on cigarettes, cigars or pipes. These images are repulsive and some people may find them deeply disturbing.

Janssens did not use real cigarettes during the shoot, and instead replaced them with sticks of chalk or cheese, and used candles and incense to create smoke. Her models wore old- fashioned clothes – with touches of British missionaries, Victorian schoolmistresses and 1920 mobsters – showing the habit as archaic.

What inspired her for this collection is after she watched a video of an Indonesian toddler smoking cigarettes that made worldwide headlines in 2010.

“I felt that seeing children smoke would have a surreal impact on the viewer and compel them to truly see the acts of smoking rather than making assumptions about the person doing it.”