Oliviero Toscani, famous photographer who left his mark with the Benetton brand, died at the age of 82 following a rare illness.
He left his mark on the history of fashion and photography. Oliviero Toscani, the photographer made famous by his provocative advertising campaigns for the Italian clothing brand Benetton, some of which were banned in Italy and France, died Monday at the age of 82 following a rare illness. The photographer revealed in August 2024 that he suffered from amyloidosis, an incurable disease which creates insoluble protein deposits in the tissues, explaining that he had lost 40 kilos in one year.
“I’m not afraid of dying. As long as it is not painful,” he then assured in an interview with the major Milanese daily Il Corriere della Sera. “It is with immense sadness that we announce that today, January 13, 2025, our beloved Oliviero began his next journey,” his family wrote on Instagram. “To explain certain things, words are not enough. This is what you taught us. Goodbye Oliviero. Keep dreaming,” Benetton reacted on Instagram by publishing a photo taken by the artist.
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A career of scandals and provocations
Born on February 28, 1942 in the Lombard capital, Oliviero Toscani had built his career on scandal and provocation with campaigns for the clothes of the Italian clothing group Benetton from 1983.
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These campaigns, which toured the world, notably featured a black woman breast-feeding a white child (1989), a man dying of AIDS and a nun with a cornet kissing a young priest (1992), people sentenced to death in the United States (2000), a young anorexic woman (2007). “I hate artistic photography,” he said in 2010. “Photography becomes art when it provokes a reaction in us, whether it’s interest, curiosity or attention.”
His campaigns for Benetton
Several of its “United Colors of Benetton” campaigns were banned in Italy, but also in France. Reviving the original provocation, the group shocked again at the end of 2011 with photomontages showing the greats of this world kissing each other on the lips, including the Pope and an imam.
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A 2012 calendar presented by Toscani in Florence represented 12 penises, after that of 2011 which was composed of the same number of female pubes. Asked by Il Corriere to know which photo he would choose if he had to choose only one, he replied: “For the whole, for the commitment. It’s not a photo that makes history, it’s an ethical, aesthetic and political choice.”
Toscani and Benetton definitively broke up at the beginning of 2020 after controversial comments by the photographer on the tragedy of the road bridge which collapsed in Genoa in 2018, killing 43 people.
The Benetton family was then the main shareholder of the company ASPI (Autostrade per l’Italie) which managed the bridge at the time of the disaster. “But who cares if a bridge collapses,” he said during a radio broadcast. He then claimed that his statements had been taken out of context. Still in Corriere, this father of six children born from three unions assured that he “only regrets the things that I have not done, not the ones that I have done”.
