Italian photographer and art director Oliviero Toscani, who courted controversy with his provocative campaigns for clothing brand Benetton during the 1980s and 90s, has died at the age of 82, his family announced on Monday. The photographer had revealed over the summer that he was battling a rare disease known as amyloidosis in which a […]Italian photographer and art director Oliviero Toscani, who courted controversy with his provocative campaigns for clothing brand Benetton during the 1980s and 90s, has died at the age of 82, his family announced on Monday. The photographer had revealed over the summer that he was battling a rare disease known as amyloidosis in which a
Italian photographer and art director Oliviero Toscani, who courted controversy with his provocative campaigns for clothing brand Benetton during the 1980s and 90s, has died at the age of 82, his family announced on Monday.
The photographer had revealed over the summer that he was battling a rare disease known as amyloidosis in which a protein called amyloid builds up in vital organs.
Born in Milan in 1942, Toscani was the son of celebrated Corriere della Sera photojournalist Fedele Toscani.
After studying photography and graphic design at Zurich University of the Art in the late 1960s, Toscani started building a career as a fashion photographer with magazines such as Elle, Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar.
He shot to international prominence in the early 1980s after Luciano Benetton hired him as art director at his family-owned clothing company.
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Toscani’s marketing campaigns rarely featured Benetton’s trademark brightly-colored knits but rather tapped into the zeitgeist, exploring issues such as the HIV/AIDS epidemic, racism and the death penalty.
They included the 1992 campaign using an image of a HIV/AIDS epidemic victim David Kirby as he took his final breaths surrounded by family in a hospice in Colombia, Ohio.
The use of the image, taken by then journalism student Therese Frare and first published in Life magazine in 1990, angered both Roman Catholics, who said the image mocked religious iconography, and AIDS activists, who viewed the use of the image as offensive and exploitative.
Kirby’s family said they had authorized the use of the image to raise awareness around AIDS, and as a last memorial to their late son.
“I wasn’t really interested in the company’s sweaters,” Toscani said in an interview with The United Nations of Photography site in 2012.
“On the contrary, I think it’s important for a company to show its social intelligence and sensitivity to the society… the results showed that this concept worked. During the 18 years I worked with Luciano Benetton, the company grew in size 20 times over,”
Other Benetton campaigns under Toscani’s direction included the 2000 focus on capital punishment featuring portraits of people on death row in the U.S., taken by the photographer over a two-year period at the end of the 1990s.
Toscani’s collaboration with Benetton also extended to the creation in the early 1990s of magazine Colors in partnership with U.S. graphic designer Tibor Kalman, which captured the rise of an increasingly multicultural world.
Other joint ventures with Luciano Benetton included research institute Fabrica in the northern city of Treviso. The body briefly dabbled in cinema in the 2000s, under the direction of Marco Muller, but now operates mainly as residency focused on fostering exchange between young creatives.
After parting company with Benetton in 2000, Toscani continued to champion issues dear to his heart such as gay rights, racism, anorexia through his work for other brands.
He is survived by his wife of Kirsti Toscani (née Moseng) and their three children Rocco, Lola and Ali Toscani.
