The Florida Museum of Photographic Arts in Tampa will host an exhibit of cigar photography through July 19.
Cigars! Photography, Industry, and Identity pairs rare nineteenth and early twentieth-century vintage photographs of tobacco growing, cigar making, and cigar smoking from The Burns Collection & Archive in New York with modern photographs of the 25 cigar factories still standing in Tampa by Zack Wittman. The exhibit also celebrates the 140th anniversary of the first cigar rolled in Ybor City in 1886.
In support of the exhibition, the Burns Collection has published a new book, Cigars: From Seed to Smoke, A Photographic History, featuring 250 vintage photographs documenting the early days of the cigar industry. J.C. Newman Cigar Co. commissioned Wittman to take 12,000 images of Tampa’s remaining cigar factories. Last year, Newman and Wittman published Cigar City: A Legacy of Tampa’s Founding Industry.
On May 21 at 5:30 p.m., J.C. Newman’s historian Holden Rasmussen will give a presentation at the museum on the history and evolution of the cigar industry in Tampa.
