Bar photography was so much cooler when you could smoke inside

Of course, there’s also the cancer

Two Parisian couples smoke and drink at a bal-musette dance club in 1931. (Print Collector/Getty Images)

When Ireland instituted its historic workplace smoking ban in 2004, the locale most touched was the neighborhood pub. That a country where consuming alcohol indoors holds such a high position in the cultural imaginary would ban smoking was a shock to local publicans and punters alike. Would people stop visiting the bar, or just quit lighting up altogether?

The Irish ban was only the most publicized in a global trend of anti-smoking legislation. New York City had barred butts the year before. California way back in 1995. Today’s youngest drinkers probably can’t even remember a time when the air in restaurants was laced with tobacco haze and bar tops were littered with overflowing ash trays and cellophane wrappers. They might also be unaware that bars didn’t always smell like stale beer, disinfectant, and bathroom waste. Yes, millennials, our cigs used to cover all that up.

For romantics, smoking bans also deflated some of the barroom’s ambience and sex appeal. Olfactory onslaught notwithstanding, the moody atmosphere of low-ceilinged, smokey clubs gave way to the emptiness of cold open space. Smoke had been like a warm blanket draped over the shoulders. A comforting embrace. Cigarettes could be the lonely drinker’s best companion or a saucy conversationalist’s prop. Bumming one was an excuse for introductions—sharing an act of camaraderie. They were a complement to booze’s bite on the palate. And holding one made you look cool as hell in pictures.

Two men smoking cigarettes at a table while having beers, c. 1960. (Jamie Hodgson/Getty Images)

It’s no coincidence that photography and the burning of butts work so well together. They both came of age in the late 1800s, moving from fringe technology to mainstream necessity as the world careened into industrial and technological modernity. The 20th century gave us new kinds of war, new kinds of fashion and entertainment, new platforms for information. And the humble cigarette—equally at home betwixt the fingers of day laborers and aristocrats—was there through it all. After all, what would Casablanca have been with a butt-less Bogart? Mao’s revolution minus his Chunghwas? The 1990s without a Marlboro between Drew Barrymore’s lips?

Cigarettes are as much about image as they are addiction. Going forward, their absence from our collective image bank will take some time to register. But though the world is decidedly better off without its cancer sticks, we may never look quite as good as we did before we realized they were killing us.

A woman smoking a cigarette at Sammy’s Bar on the Bowery, New York City, 1943. (Weegee/ICP/Getty Images)

Free French sailors and customers at the York Minster pub in Soho, London, in 1941. (Kurt Hutton/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

(left) Exiled Cuban journalist Rafael Solano smokes a cigarette during an interview with the Associated Press in a Madrid bar in 1996. (AP Photo/Paul White) / (left) Man Sitting at Bar. (Bettmann/Getty Images)

A smoking man checks out a woman in a fur coat at a Paris bar in 1979. (David Turnley/Corbis/Getty Images)

A woman smokes a cigarette in Beijing bar ahead of a proposed 2015 smoking ban. (Fred Dufour/AFP/Getty Images)

Freshly released from prison, a British man has a drink with his brother in a Brighton pub in 1953. (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis via Getty Images)

Filipek’s bar in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, 1938. (Sheldon Dick/Library of Congress)

A man smokes in a bar in central Moscow on May 30, 2014, one month before tough new anti-smoking legislation came into effect. (Alexander Utkin/AFP/Getty Images)

Too tired or too drunk to finish his drink, a man falls asleep on a bar at 3 a.m. in New York, Sept. 4, 1944. (AP Photo)