Smoker's Fetish

Sparking up in bars

Some may remember when a girl would approach you in a bar with an unlit cigarette and a certain "look" signaling that you needed to give her a light.

I wasn't a smoker but after a while I learned to carry a lighter in my pocket so as not to be a dud and miss an introduction. Photo by me somewhere in downtown San Diego, probably mid-1997. 35mm (ASA 400, maybe) Sav-On film negative digitized in Photoshop last night after all these years.

Then in 1997 [pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov] Sacramento outlawed smoking in California bars after January 1, 1998. It was the first state in the country to do so, prohibiting indoor smoking in nightspots, bar/restaurant combinations, bingo parlors, cardrooms, and casinos on a statewide basis.

Below are some 25-year-old images from the time immediately preceding the bar-ban. I was converting 35mm color negs to digital the other night and hadn't seen them since they were shot.