Benetton photographer Oliviero Toscani dies: fashion, provocation and despair

His heyday was the eighties and nineties, a long time ago, and yet you can see them straight away: the photos that Oliviero Toscani took for the advertising campaigns of the Italian fashion brand Benetton. The white baby being nursed at the breast of a black woman, the copulating horses, one a black stallion, the other a white mare, or the screaming, bloodied infant still attached to the umbilical cord.

The advertising posters stood in stark contrast to the well-behaved Benetton clothes in their colorful, bold colors that were typical of the eighties, and only the lettering “United Colors of Benetton” referred to the brand. Toscani wanted to provoke, wanted to shock and arouse both with his advertising photos; “shockvertising” was his term for it.

Later he also used press photos for the advertising campaigns, for example of the dying AIDS activist David Kirby, the photo of a bare bottom with the stamp “HIV positive” or the blood-stained clothing of a Croatian fighter who died in the Yugoslav wars in 1994.

Some of Toscani’s campaigns were banned in Germany by the Federal Court of Justice; It was also often discussed whether his recordings that discussed racism and saw themselves as anti-racist were not themselves racist. In the book “Advertising is a smiling carrion” he himself described his way of working as follows: “I am not cynical, I am looking for new means of expression.”

Born in 1942 as the son of a photo reporter for the “Corriere della Sera”, Toscani studied photography and graphics at the School of Applied Arts in Zurich and initially worked for fashion magazines such as “Elle” and “Vogue”. He first attracted attention in the early 1970s. He designed a poster for the Kappa jeans brand “Jesus Jeans” that only showed a woman’s bottom in jeans that were far too tight and underneath it was the Bible saying “Whoever loves me will follow me.”

That was, in a sense, the start of his career at Benetton, which ended in 2000 after he fell out with company founder Luciano Benetton over a campaign involving photographs of US prisoners sentenced to death. Toscani continued to work as a photographer, polarizing people with his photo of an anorexic, for example, and returned to Benetton again in 2017. Now Oliverio Toscani has died in Cecina, Tuscany. He was 82 years old.