What Oliviero Toscani has left us

Hated or beloved, venerated or misunderstood, Oliviero Toscani has changed photography and communication. Or he did not? We talked about him with those who worked with him, those who knew him, who were his friends and those who followed his steps. 

Passed away on January 14, 2025 at the age of 82 from a rare disease that had afflicted him for a few years, Oliviero Toscani in his last interview with Corriere della Sera in August 2024 said, “I regret the things I have not done, not the things I have done. I could have myself chained, but I would not lose the sense of freedom. Now I am like chained, but I am free to think as I think and act as I think I should”.

Oliviero Toascani, Photo: Leandro Emede via Wikimedia Commons

His controversial and original voice led him to never remain in the shadows and always stand out, even in a context like the Venice Biennale. In 1993 Pierre Restany judged his work as the only notable exception along with Damien Hirst's work at Aperto '93, in Domus issue 752.

In a New York Times article from a couple of years earlier, Toscani tells how, after all, the response to his provocations said more about the audience involved than his authorial voice: “Mr. Toscani recognizes that his campaigns are targeted like this: in Spain,” he says, “which is a young country, they look at the priest and the nun and smile at this image. In Italy, where there are still old journalists, institutions full of old people, they're all upset”. 

A/I 1991, “Neonata”. Credits: Oliviero Toscani

Denis Curti, on Oliviero Toscani's legacy

“My memories of Oliviero are very much related to arguments because he was like that, but also of incredible sweetness immediately afterward, but not because he had regrets, but because for him controversy was the salt of life”. Photography critic, author, gallery owner, and curator, Denis Curti told Domus about his relationship with Toscani, which was often confrontational:

For him there was no middle ground, either you were in on things or you weren't, you can't be in the middle. That was a teaching for me.

 Denis Curti 

Among the most heated discussions he had with the Milanese photographer, Curti certainly remembers the one about collecting: “He never wanted to commercialize his photographs in the market, because he said that photography is democratic and belongs to everyone, and this is also a mystification, I don't agree at all”. And among the aspects they agreed on was the importance of the archive: “The most important thing for a photographer is his archive, and the ability that this photographer must have in looking at the archive. In Oliviero there is a continuous invitation to look back in one's memory to always go forward, Oliviero had the ability to memorize everything”.

P/E 1992, “AIDS – David Kirby”. Concept: Oliviero Toscani, Credits: Thérèse Frare

And from the subject of the archive to that of authorship as a broad concept, linked to the brilliance of the idea: “In many of his works, as in ‘Cacas’ for example,” Curti recalls again, “Mariarosa (Marirosa Toscani Ballo, Oliviero's sister ed.) had taken the photos, not him. And so from this point of view what he leaves behind is a really important legacy: it's not so fundamental to take the photograph, because some of Oliviero's greatest campaigns were done not with photos of him. To emphasize that pictures are taken with the head”. 

Toscani as seen by Pasolini

Born on February 28, 1942, in Milan, the son of Fedele Toscani, a photojournalist for Corriere della Sera, Toscani began his stellar career with advertising campaigns such as the one for Jesus jeans “You will have no other jeans but me” – commented on even by Pier Paolo Pasolini in Corriere della Sera as “an exception in the fixed canon of the slogan”. He then grew up in Andy Warhol's New York of the 1970s, until the creative partnership with Luciano Benetton between the 1980s and 1990s, which gave him the opportunity to make a significant revolution in the world of photography as much as in the world of communication and advertising, moving on the border between disciplines, in a way that was controversial for some.

A/I 1991, “ Angelo e diavolo”. Credits: Oliviero Toscani

In the book “Moriremo Eleganti. Conversation with Luca Sommi” (Aliberti editore, 2012), Toscani says "I don't advertise, I simply put in my photos what I think should be seen. That can be mild and moving, atrocious and disgusting”. Provocation as a way of positive interaction, regardless of the type of reaction, is the cornerstone of his work. “If there is no controversy,” the photographer said again to Sommi,“it means there is no interest”.

Toscani's legacy

Throughout his career, he has consistently sought partnerships with various high-end brands and prestigious global publications, never viewing his creations as isolated works; instead, he has always taken into account the surrounding environment in which his artistic endeavors were evolving, with the idea of creating discussion but also opportunities for growth, participation, and the transmission of his vision and experience, as in the Fabrica project. Founded in 1993 near Treviso, again together with the patron Benetton, Fabrica is one of Toscani's great victories, a communications research center, a forge of international talent, inspired by the Warholian Factory concept of interdisciplinary study and exchange, recounted by Loredana Mascheroni in an extensive article in Domus issue 815 dated May 1999 and then more recently on the occasion of its 30th anniversary.

An article about Fabrica on Domus 815 (May 1999) with pictures by Ramak Fazel

Obviously, Oliviero Toscani's influence has largely transcended the boundaries of projects directly related to him, expanding to new generations of photographers: “daring” is the keyword that fashion photographer Zoe Natale Mannella, born in London in 1997, calls out when thinking about Toscani's work:

Definitely one of the first names to have drawn me to a certain way of thinking about my work as a fashion photographer. He taught me to dare, to push beyond the trendy standard. A continuous tension toward the system.

Zoe Natale Mannella

And if fashion is – in the words of the Milanese photographer – “that perverse system that makes us lose our sense of the ridiculous and that of proportion”, and in which somehow gaining acclaim is part of a photographer's job, Toscani set the standard precisely in this, in going beyond: beyond the product, beyond excessive elaboration, beyond excess in image construction.

Zoe Natale Mannella adds: “Every photo of those years had a much deeper and political meaning, disruptive, conveyed towards a few elements and a simple light. Photos understandable to everyone. Photos that lived for themselves, iconic, not subject to the dominance of products”. She adds, “I find his legacy essential in reminding us to expose ourselves and say things, even if they are uncomfortable and not ‘fashionable’”.

A/I1995, “Occhi - FABRICA” Credits: Oliviero Toscani

Gabriele Micalizzi photographer and war photojournalist and Domus contributor, met Oliviero Toscani at the Masters of Photography talent show, which he won in 2016. “He didn't like reportage, but then over time he kind of fell in love with me, he even called me a genius once”. Of course, Micalizzi and Toscani also argued during the program, “and he told me ‘photographers should talk less’ while I was explaining a photo. The next time – Micalizzi recalls – I showed up with a sign in my hand saying 'no comment,' and he laughed”.  

Compared to today's photographers, Micalizzi says, surely Toscani was lucky enough to work in the right years, with enlightened people who gave him carte blanche.

Toscani's legacy in our time concerns his ability to have created an Italian current of photography, which is a bit of an artistic current, because there is a ‘Toscani-like’ way of looking at the world. Photographers are often very selfish and never give anything back to photography, he tried and succeeded, with Fabrica, with Colors...

Gabriele Micalizzi

Sam Baron: making Toscani's thinking become three-dimensional

Born in 1976, Sam Baron is a French designer with a brilliant international career, and from 2007 to 2017 he was Head of Design at Fabrica, where he first got in touch with Olivero Toscani's working method of deep research of ambitious and courageous ideas, perfectly realized. 

What I can say is that in a certain way he was always there, even though at the beginning of my moving to Fabrica he was already gone. That place had absorbed his thinking anyway, it's as if he had left rules behind, among them being very demanding in your work.

Sam Baron

Baron's example to Domus of a work that tells how Toscani's method has penetrated into the creative process of Fabrica's projects is the “Hot and Cold” exhibition created by Fabrica in the 2014 Fuori Salone to promote the new Daikin air conditioner: art installations that made one of the least visually satisfying appliances found in contemporary homes poetic and engaging.

And then on Colors magazine, founded by Toscani together with Tibor Kalman, for which Baron edited the issue 79 on the theme of collecting, and which won the Silver Cube at the Art Directors Club 90th Annual Award (2011): “This magazine in my opinion had the ability to create a culture out of the mainstream, to open up new visions, to create space for broader thoughts. Here its vision took a more 'cultural' form, because the magazine is an object you choose to read and look at, it doesn't just happen to you like a billboard on the street”.

Colors magazine covers

When asked what Toscani's legacy is in both the world of communication and photography, he replied, “To the new generations in my opinion he left the idea that things are not done gratuitously, a photo has to say something, look for something, question, make people think”.

P/E 1992, “Container”. Concept: Oliviero Toscani, Credits: Patrick Robert/Sygma

Oliviero Toscani thought of photography – as Denis Curti told us – as something that “you feel on you, either you have it or you don't, you have to master it, and it has to be like a virus, it has to belong to you, it has to be the reason why you wake up in the morning”, and this all-absorbing vision is the manifesto of an absolute dedication, in which photography is not just a craft or an art, but an extension of being itself, a passion that invades every aspect of life.

Opening image: A/I 1990, “Coperta” Credits: Oliviero Toscani

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