Tobacco People

“Hazlegrove's dramatic and moving images combine elements of the formal portraiture of Richard Avedon
with the journalistic style of photo documentary legends Walker Evans and Robert Frank.”

Tobacco was an integral part of my family’s life for centuries. But in 2000, the last crop was harvested and sold. There was no justifying the back-breaking work with so meager a return on the investment. A big part of our family’s history was disappearing and I wondered about other farmers in the area who were facing similar changes. How would they survive without tobacco?

What started as a personal photo essay documenting the end of an era on our own family farm, developed into a more expansive project including tobacco-growing families in the Connecticut River Valley and Pennsylvania. I was hired by Philip Morris International to continue my work on a global level and with the guidance of leaf experts from Universal Leaf Corporation and Philip Morris International, I spent two years traveling and recording tobacco-growing communities in Indonesia, Brazil, and Malawi. I traveled to Cuba, and the Dominican Republic and worked with Japan Tobacco International in
Tanzania on separate trips.

In 2015, The Taubman Museum of Art, The O. Winston Link Museum, and The Harrison Museum of African American Culture collaborated to mount simultaneous exhibitions of Tobacco People. Each museum chose images from the collection that were relevant to their museums. (Slate Magazine article) The main body of work which included 6x6ft black and white enlargements, 2 video installations, and a 19th-century tobacco press from Brazil was shown at the Taubman Museum of Art. Tobacco People-Africa and the Americas, shown at the Harrison Museum of African American Culture focused on the role of Africans and African Americans in the long history of tobacco production.
The O. Winston Link Museum’s: Who Works These Fields concentrated on three Virginia Farms and their predominately Mexican labor forces.

At the completion of my project, I created individual books on the countries I visited, Malawi, Brazil, and Indonesia.
These coffee table-styled books contain black and white and color photos as well as historical imagery, revealing the importance tobacco played in the socioeconomic evolution of each country.

Click on the images below to see previews of each book. Books are available for purchase individually or as a box set.

Brian Sieveking Curator of: Sarah Hazlegrove: Tobacco People - The Taubman Museum of Art