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Remembering Oliviero Toscani
13 January 2025
Italian photographer and art director Oliviero Toscani has died after a two-year battle with amyloidosis. He was 82.
Born in Milan in 1942, he followed in the footsteps of his father, Fedele Toscani, a photojournalist for Corriera della Sera. He published his first photograph, an image of Rachele Mussolini, the dictator's second wife, when he was 14.
Toscani graduated from the Zurich School of Applied Arts with a degree in photography before making his debut in the world of advertising with the campaign for the Algida croissant. His photographs were published in Elle, Vogue, GQ, Harper's Bazaar, Esquire but he also took photos for fashion houses such as Valentino, Chanel, Fiorucci, Esprit and Prénatal.
In 1982, He joined the Benetton Group as art director.
At Benetton, his advertising campaigns for the colorful textiles spoke to larger issues of equality, the mafia, the fight against homophobia, the fight against AIDS and the death penalty.
In 2000 his partnership with the Benetton group ended after a controversial campaign that used real photos of people sentenced to death in the United States.
He then worked on fashion campaigns for the RaRe brand, focusing on homophobia and collaborations with the Red Cross, the Istituto Superiore della Sanità and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. His socially conscious images focused on themes of security, violence against women and anorexia.
In 2007 he created the Razza Umana project, a gallery of portraits that formed a visual census of all the somatic and social characteristics of the human race.
He returned to Benetton in 2017. But in 2020 that ended after his remark during a radio interview about the 2018 bridge collapse in Genoa that killed 43 people. "Who cares that a bridge collapsed?" he had said. He apologized, but Benetton fired him.
Of his photography, he said, "The transition from analog to digital has meant that the photographic medium was simplified, but the essence of the photographer itself does not change. Like a writer, he doesn't write better with a Montblanc instead of a pencil. So, the camera is a medium like any other."
He went on, "I think that the true photographer is not a camera maniac, but an intellectual who criticizes the world and is able to see something and show it to other people. This is my real job."
One he did with uncommon clarity, as anyone who saw the United Colors of Benetton campaigns remembers to this day.