Italian photographer and art director Oliviero Toscani, who sparked controversy with his provocative campaigns for the clothing brand Benetton during the 1980s and 1990s, has died at the age of 82, his family announced Monday.
The photographer revealed over the summer that he was suffering from a rare disease known as amyloidosis, in which a protein called amyloid accumulates in vital organs.
Toscani was born in Milan in 1942, the son of the famous Corriere della Sera photojournalist Fidel Toscani.
After studying photography and graphic design at Zurich University of the Arts in the late 1960s, Toscani began building a career as a fashion photographer with magazines such as Elle, Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar.
He rose to international fame in the early 1980s after Luciano Benetton hired him as art director at his family-owned clothing company.
Tuscany’s marketing campaigns rarely featured Benetton’s trademark brightly colored knits, but rather tapped into the zeitgeist and explored issues such as the HIV/AIDS epidemic, racism and the death penalty.
This included a 1992 campaign using a photo of HIV/AIDS epidemic victim David Kirby taking his last breaths surrounded by his family in a hospice in Columbia, Ohio.
The use of the photo, taken by then-journalism student Therese Frere and first published in Life magazine in 1990, angered Roman Catholics, who said the photo mocked religious iconography, and AIDS activists, who viewed the use of the photo as insulting and exploitative. .
Kirby’s family said they allowed the photo to be used to raise awareness about AIDS and as a final memorial to their late son.
“I wasn’t really interested in the company’s sweaters,” Toscani said in an interview with UNPhoto in 2012.
“On the contrary, I think it is important for the company to show its social intelligence and sensitivity towards society… The results have shown the success of this concept. During 18 years of working with Luciano Benetton, the size of the company has increased 20 times.
Other Benetton campaigns under Toscani’s supervision included a 2000 focus on the death penalty, which featured photographs of people on death row in the United States, 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 of Colors magazine in the early 1990s in partnership with American graphic designer Tibor Kalman, which depicted the rise of an increasingly multicultural world.
Other joint projects with Luciano Benetton included the Fabrica Research Institute in the northern city of Treviso. The body was briefly involved in cinema in the 2000s, under the direction of Marco Müller, but now operates mainly as a residency focused on promoting exchange between young creatives.
After the company split from Benetton in 2000, Toscani continued to champion issues close to his heart such as gay rights, racism and anorexia through his work for other brands.
He is survived by his wife Kirsty Toscani (nee Mosing) and their three children Rocco, Lola and Ali Toscani.
