This project is not about smoking. And it is certainly not about nostalgia. The cigarette here is neither a habit nor a fetish. It’s a gesture — a pause, a flick of the wrist, a shadow on the mouth. A shape the body takes when no one is asking it to explain itself.

The visual language draws from the grain of film noir, the quiet defiance of European cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, and the silent charge of certain feminist images — like the 1929 “Torches of Freedom” protest in New York, where women smoked in public to challenge social codes. But Femme & Flame is not historical. It doesn’t imitate. It reflects.

It reflects a photographer’s ongoing fascination with presence — especially when it’s unguarded. The project resists glamour, yet remains deeply aesthetic. It avoids cliché, yet it works with one of the most charged visual symbols of the 20th century: the woman and the cigarette.

There is no single interpretation here. Some of the women look strong. Some look lost. Some seem in control, others in free fall. That ambiguity is essential. It’s not the photographer’s gaze that defines them — it’s what the moment allows, what they allow, and what remains long after.

At its core, Femme & Flame is a portrait of tension — between elegance and instinct, stillness and movement, the public and the deeply personal.

The first public presentation of this project took place at Eddie Sicoy Bar in Sofia (June–July 2025), as part of the Art in the Bar initiative, in collaboration with Monochrome Hub Gallery. The exhibition featured 25 selected portraits from a much larger archive — one that continues to grow.

This is not a closed chapter.
It’s a quiet archive in progress.
And the flame is still lit.