The World of Tobacco’ is a film made in 1956 by Alfred Ehrhardtfor the Reemtsma company. Ehrhardt documents the journey made by tobacco from seed and harvest in countries such as Rhodesia (today’s Zimbabwe), Turkey, the USA and Greece to its arrival by ship in Hamburg and its processing into cigarettes. During filmmaking a series of several black-and-white photographs were taken, which can now be viewed in the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek.
With this film and the accompanying photographs Ehrhardt, who had already received an award at the Biennale in 1950 for his Ernst Barlach film and made his name as a photographer of the New Objectivity school, delivered material that was ‘an unending chain of visual climaxes’, as the Lübecker Nachrichten put it in its review of 30.10.1956.