These controversial anti-smoking adverts put art and photography to perhaps the most noble aim possible - savings lives. But how effective are they?

Since the world's first anti-smoking campaign appeared in Germany in 1912 in a journal called Der Tabakgegner ('The Tobacco Opponent'), tactics employed by the anti-smoking lobby have grown more and more extreme as the true cost of the habit became apparent.

Today, governments and charities across the world employ their own version of 'shock tactics' to scare their population out of smoking, drawing on everything from its affect on your health, sexual performance - and most harrowing of all - children.

In a sense, working on these images must be liberating for the artists involved - there is literally no image too stark, no concept too upsetting that can't be justified with a simple nod towards the scenes in any cancer ward.

While art and photography play their role in administrating a short, sharp shock to anyone puffing away, books have played a vital role in the anti-smoking fight too.

Allen Carr, a reformed smoker turned self-help guru released the best-seller The Easy Way to Stop Smoking in 1985 and declared it a phenomenal success, with a 90% success rate in helping smokers stop for 3 months and 51% in helping them stop for a year.

Carr's contention was that hammering home the evils of smoking is an ineffective and - furthermore - disingenuous approach for any government to take when his own method, which focuses on positive reinforcement of the benefits of stopping smoking, is demonstratively more successful.

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• A stop smoking campaign which shows a tumour growing from a cigarette was launched in December 2012. According to the Department of Health (DoH), just 15 cigarettes can cause a mutation than can lead to cancerous tumours. <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/12/27/shocking-anti-smoking-advert-cancer-cigarette-tumour-tv_n_2370655.html">Read the full story here.</a>