Oliviero Toscani: Benetton photographer dies at 82

The Italian star photographer Oliviero Toscani (1942-2025), known, among other things, for his advertising campaigns for the fashion brand Benetton, is dead. He died on Monday (January 13th) after a serious illness at the age of 82.

Toscani was admitted to the hospital in the town of Cecina in Tuscany on January 10th because his condition had worsened. The photographer had been suffering from the rare disease amyloidosis for around two years. He leaves behind his wife of 50 years, Kirsti Toscani, and their children Rocco, Lola and Ali.

Oliviero Toscani became known in the 1980s for his controversial design of advertising campaigns for the fashion house Benetton, such as the posters under the slogan “All the colors of the world” with children of all skin colors dressed in colorful Benetton sweaters. Racism was repeatedly the subject of Toscani’s pictures, just as he was accused of racism on several occasions.

In general, Toscani regularly used socially critical and controversial images for the campaigns. In the early 1990s, his use of several press photographs for the campaigns attracted attention. He used a photograph of the dying AIDS activist David Kirby and his grieving family, that of a corpse of a shot Mafioso and his grieving family, or that of an overloaded refugee ship off the Albanian coast. A later campaign showed naked bodies stamped with “HIV positive” or a shot of the bloody shirt with a bullet hole of a fallen soldier in the Bosnian War.

After an advertising campaign in 2000 that showed portraits of death row prison inmates in the USA, Benetton co-founder Luciano Benetton distanced himself from him. Toscani then left the brand. The photographer received renewed attention in 2007 with his series of photos of the anorexic model Isabelle Caro. The “No-Anorexia” campaign was intended to draw attention to the problem of the obsession with losing weight.

Following Toscani’s death, the Benetton brand shared a photo of the photographer from 1989, showing a hand holding a bouquet of flowers, on Instagram and wrote: “To explain certain things, words are simply not enough. That’s what you taught us. And that’s what you want We pay tribute to you with a photo that you took for us many years ago. Farewell Oliviero.