Still Rolling

With more than 3.4 million residents these days in a sprawling Tampa Bay area, it takes imagination to envision its sleepy streets in the 1880s: a village of fishermen and ranchers, an army fort, and fewer than a thousand locals. 

But Spanish entrepreneur Vicente Martinez Ybor must have pictured more when he moved his cigar operation to Tampa Bay from Key West in part due to labor unrest. The Keys offered closer proximity to Cuban tobacco, but the island at the end of an archipelago was also harder to reach for shipping. Tampa, then, became a hub for cigar making as others followed Ybor’s lead, resulting in 200 factories at the city’s cigar peak. 

This April 13 marks the 140th anniversary of the first cigar rolled in Tampa’s Ybor City, the historic center of the industry. Just in time for the milestone, a new book, Cigar City: The Legacy of Tampa’s Founding Industry, captures scenes from the 25 remaining factories. Drew Newman, a fourth-generation owner at J.C. Newman, the cigar company founded by his great-grandfather in 1895, worked with Tampa Bay-based photographer Zack Wittman to commission the book. It’s inspired in part by an archive of about 20,000 photos made during the industry’s halcyon days by a family of photographers called the Burgert Brothers. 

In the pages of the new project, we can see what remains of the industry, and traces of the time when Tampa emerged as an oasis for Cuban, Spanish, Italian and Eastern European immigrants. Workers came to roll cigars, but also to open businesses, to run printing presses or cook lunches for workers. “That legacy is still very much alive today,” says Newman of the city’s culture, which includes nearby restaurants and bakeries serving Cuban coffees and Italian pastries. 

The Newman family has taken more steps to preserve cigar history. Their factory, which has survived two World Wars, two pandemics, various tariffs and many storms, is now open for tours and classes. “We get to be ambassadors to the city of Tampa,” Newman says. Guests can watch hand-rolled production or visit the curing room or see relics, like the company’s last bale of Cuban tobacco imported before the 1962 embargo. Cigar City provides a document for this moment, which future generations can look back on as well. 

Wildsam Photo Editor Samantha Shanahan spoke with Cigar City’s Zack Wittman, a Wildsam contributor, about the book’s photos and his process. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Wildsam: You've covered the Tampa area extensively. Did you have any sort of interface with the cigar legacy in previous assignments or coverage? 

Zack Wittman: Not really. The only exposure I had to it was working on general street scenes in Ybor City. Big factories still dot the landscape of that area, but for the most part, people only see the touristy shops, which are just little windows in cigar shops where people are, like, hand-rolling maybe a few dozen cigars.

I would drive past the factories all the time and have no idea of their history. So it was great to have an excuse to go into a lot of them with a camera and learn from a first-person point of view what they're like inside, and experience a slice of cigar history. 

Did the Burgert Brothers’ archive influence how you sought out to photograph? 

ZW: A little bit. The only place that actually makes cigars at scale anymore is J.C. Newman. A lot of the [older] imagery is the hustle and bustle of a thriving industry. I learned what it used to be like from the archives, and that kind of informed how I would shoot the empty space. One of the challenges with assignment photo work is 60 percent of the time you're photographing something that has already happened. The writer visited two weeks ago, and we either recreate or pay homage to what they saw or reference it in some way. Assignment work really prepared me for this, because about 95 percent of what we were shooting was either repurposed or empty cigar factories. Channeling that idea of how you photograph something that's not there was really informative. 

WS: Can you speak a little bit more on the historical charge of these spaces, and how to photograph the past? 

ZW: Yeah, I looked at individual objects or touchstones in a space that would pinpoint to a particular moment in time, such as a Polaroid of a Christmas party on a factory floor. You can look at a photo and say, 'Something happened here, and this is an artifact that was left behind.' It makes the viewer ask questions. 

In another photograph, there’s a piece of broken glass from a break-in. The factory is abandoned, so kids and teenagers are always trying to urban-explore and break in. Seeing this man hold a big piece of glass causes the viewer to be like, ‘Where did this glass come from? Why are people trying to break in here?' It brings together interconnected storylines, just with one object. I have hundreds of photos of empty rooms that don't really have that much going on. Working with Ariel [Zambelich, the editor on the project], we went through finding the images that had stories in them. 

Drew at J.C. Newman talked about a favorite photo. He mentioned one taken from behind his family’s factory. You can see the houses and the life that used to be there. 

ZW: Yeah, that picture was one of the first we made. They were still kind of feeling me out, and I was kind of feeling them out. We were standing on the roof of Perfecto Garcia down the street, because I wanted to go see what the other factories looked like in the landscape of the community, right? The unique thing about the cigar industry in Ybor is the factories are very interwoven into the community. People's backyards are right up against them. The workers at the factories would often walk to work. The factories with the clock towers, that was their timekeeping. The clock towers would ring and wake you up. 

We were standing on the roof, and I took this picture, and Drew said, ‘I've never seen this angle before.' It's so cool to see it in the context of all the casitas and the water tower, and you can see there's a Burger King sign way in the distance. That was definitely the moment where it all clicked. 

The book is structured in chapters that take us from the industry’s foundations to the changing market to the road ahead. There's a moment of conflict in the middle of the book, where we see museum-like relics of factories, and there are tension points where there’s a hot dog stand next to a historic factory. Was that a moment of contrast that helped create a structure or was that more in editing that you guys figured that out? 

ZW: Kind of both. The structure kind of came from me. I'm from Detroit originally, so my experience of Detroit is similar to Cigar City, where it’s a post-industrial town. That was something I really wanted to explore.
What does post-industrialism look like in a town that was built by a single industry, which is maybe not brand-friendly, per se? It was a difficult theme to explore when working in tandem with a company, but they were super-cool about it. It made sense to have a through line while also giving hope in the final chapter of, okay, this is the future. Here's what's happening to these buildings now. They're all being repurposed. They're finding new life. The first chapter is what the industry used to look like. It's very opulent and bustling and peak-of-industry. So the best way to tell that story, I think, came from the more journalistic documentary desire to explore that theme of post-industrialization, and it kind of just flowed from there. 

Can you talk a bit about access and your shooting process?   

ZW: The interior access was basically all through J.C. Newman and their connections. The industry is very close-knit. These buildings require a lot of attention and care. There isn't a huge financial incentive to owning a historical building like this, unless you really care about the history. That was our way in the door. Then once I was in there, I kind of had to win them over on a personal level: I'm not here to exploit you, I just want to share the history of Tampa. For the exterior, I would usually start every shoot with a full circle around each factory on foot, and I tried to go as far as I could while still being able to see the factory. Even if it was just between an alley photographing anything that was interesting. So it kind of became like these lighthouses in the middle of the neighborhoods that I circled a few times. 

If this was a personal project, and I didn't have timelines or deadlines, I would have liked to have done that a lot more and met more people who were out and get into the community aspect a little bit more. But the reality of the timeline and the post-processing was pretty hefty. As beautiful as the buildings are, nobody wants to look at a book of 200 photos of cigar factories without seeing some faces. 


Can you speak to us about the physicality of the book—any design decisions around the cover, the color, the type? 

ZW: We went through a couple of different iterations, but ultimately, I wanted something pretty minimal and pretty clean. J.C. Newman also was on board with that. The colors reference the bricks of the buildings and the tobacco leaves.
I think this is a font from an old cigar label. The squareness and the rigidity of the buildings themselves kind of lends itself to that design choice. 

You've been in Tampa Bay for over 10 years. Did anything in the process surprise you about the city? 

ZW: The thing that really jumps out to me is Tampa basically didn't exist before the cigar industry. It was scrubland and a railroad station and cattle farmers, and that was it. The one bank in the entire city of Tampa was about to close and move to Jacksonville before the cigar industry moved in. It kind of blew my mind that the city really was built on the cigar industry, and now the cigar industry has all but left, and the city’s still here. 

You work in journalism, so you're not unfamiliar to the role of photography and documenting and perceiving history. In making this book, what responsibilities did you feel to how the city will remember itself in the future or how this book will be viewed in 50 years or 100 years? 

ZW: I don't know. It's kind of not up to me in a way.  Journalists and photojournalists, especially, like to kind of curate their vision as unbiased, objective, which is, I think, kind of bullshit, because every decision that you make comes from a place in your brain. You can't turn that off. So what you're choosing to include in the book and what you're choosing to shoot, and what you're not choosing to shoot, is like, implicitly you. So that's something that I've taken into account in my work. I'm not going to implicitly have any bias, but I also have to recognize that there is a subconscious methodology that reflects who you are and how your brain works, and you kind of just have to accept that and use that to showcase your point of view in your world, because ultimately, that's what photography is. So, I wasn't thinking too much about the city. I was kind of just like, shoot what you think is interesting and make those images and try to make them all work in an edit and tell a true but interesting story in a point of view. 


Founded in the 1880s by cigar magnate Vicente Martinez-Ybor, Ybor City rose from scrubland to become the “Cigar Capital of the World,” its brick streets once humming with hand-rolled cigar factories and a polyglot workforce of Cuban, Spanish and Italian immigrants. Today, the neighborhood’s wrought-iron balconies and century-old social clubs echo that layered heritage, while cafés, galleries and music venues carry the story forward. It’s a place where Tampa’s past feels vividly present—best experienced with a café con leche in hand and the slow rhythm of Seventh Avenue underfoot.