Artist Talk with Zack Wittman

Join FMoPA on July 2 from 5:30 pm to 7 pm for an artist talk with Zack Wittman, one of the photographers behind Cigars! Photography, Industry, and Identity Zack Wittman is a contemporary documentary photographer based in St. Petersburg, Florida. He focuses his lens on the state of Florida and its inhabitants, drawing inspiration from its curiosities and contradictions. His work explores places that feel simultaneously familiar and distant, often crossing paths with strangers in tender intimacy. He explores themes of climate change, suburban isolation and human displacement with a lyrical documentary touch. The images invites viewers to slow down and engage with the environment – revealing the quiet narratives and questions embedded within each frame. Wittman is a frequent contributor to The New York Times’ photographic coverage of Florida, sharing his singular vision to shape the editorial identity of a state often misunderstood by the other 49. He works with magazines such as Vanity Fair, TIME, New York Magazine, WIRED and Rolling Stone to further share this vision. Zack Wittman’s Cigar City (2025), created in collaboration with J.C. Newman—America’s last operating cigar factory—offers a photographic exploration of Tampa’s founding industry. Through images of the 24 remaining cigar factories, each preserved in varying states of decay and adaptation, Wittman presents these structures as living artifacts—sites where history lingers even as the city continues to evolve.The photographs trace a quiet tension between past and present, revealing spaces that are at once steeped in memory, yet reaching towards the future. At 200 pages, Cigar City functions both as a visual record of Tampa’s industrial heritage and as a contemplative study of a post-industrial landscape, where identity is shaped by what endures as much as by what has been left behind.