Oliviero Toscani, photographer with a sublime message

Oliviero Toscani has passed away on Monday in Italy at the age of 82 due to an unusual disease, amyloidosis, that produced excess amyloid proteins that affected vital organs of the body. He was the man behind scores of photographs that stared down at people from billboards all over the world and declared a political message that was unconventional and provocative.

He showed an AIDS patient to sell the Benetton clothesline, and turned it into a brand. He turned the rules of advertisement on their head as it were when he thrust the images of brutal reality, whether it is an AIDS patient, the blood-splashed clothes of a soldier killed in Bosnia, or the 24 death-row prisoners in the United States.

But his images were not just about cruelty of human beings towards human beings. He also spread the message of harmony among people of different races and colours, the most moving pictures of young children of different races and colours standing with each other. They were pictures of innocence which drove home the point that all human beings belonged to one race, that of humanity.

He was not born a radical. He followed in the footsteps of his father, who was a photographer. Toscani trained in Zurich and moved into fashion photography, and built successful careers of models. One of them was the Italian diva of the 1980s and 1990s, Monica Belluci, who was the glamour queen and sensitive actress in Italian cinema.

It was in 1980 that he became the creative director of Benetton, which was until then a little known Italian clothes brand, and turned into an international best-selling business in the field of ready-made apparels. Most remember the series of faces of children of different nationalities in one of his pictures, emphasising that humanity transcends national boundaries. He was proud, and justifiably so, of what he did with his advertising strategy. He said in an interview, “I exploit clothing to raise social issues. Traditional advertising says if you buy a certain product you will be beautiful, sexually powerful, successful. All that bull***t doesn’t really exist.”

It could be argued that the Toscani spell could not have lasted because people got used to his radical provocations. But the Toscani magic was that he came up with innovative images, catching political figures, religious figures, in strange situations. The intent was sincere: to erase differences and divisions. But as long as it lasted, it had left a deep impression on the minds of millions of people across the world.

There was simplicity and innocence and beauty in many images of children, youngsters of different races and colours posing together. It made Benetton the popular clothes brand for the youth, with the tagline “United Colours of Benetton”. Toscani showed that one does not have to be gloomy and serious to convey an important and serious image. It can be done through a beautiful image, a powerful image.

Toscani’s work in fashion photography must have moulded his sensibility. He understood that beauty is indeed the quality that casts a spell on people. And he captured beauty, but it was beauty that went beyond the conventional sense of the term. Beauty must evoke emotion.

Toscani’s images evoked an emotional response in all those who glanced at the Benetton billboards. There is need to bring back his images of diverse humanity in these times of strife among nations and communities to spread the message of harmony and unity. The miracle is that Toscani achieved this rare feat of unfurling the flag of humanity through a medium whose primary aim is to sell a product, if need be by creating an illusion. To Toscani those images of reality are far more powerful.