The art direction and photographs of Oliviero Toscani were provocative not for what they showed – real life, he said, complex and contradictory – but where they were seen. The images, subjects ranging from a bloodied newborn baby to the condemned of death row, would have been unremarkable on the editorial pages of a classic photo-reportage publication such as Life or Paris Match. But they sprang out of the safe spaces reserved for prestige adverts at the front of fashion magazines, or were pasted up on big billboards.
Toscani, who has died aged 82, regarded advertising as the most powerful medium, and claimed an artist’s right, like Michelangelo, to express his ideas in it. Like Michelangelo, he had a patron of papal benevolence, Luciano Benetton, who paid for the spaces where Toscani’s creations were seen. Benetton had co-founded a family firm that evolved into a company making mid-price fashion knit separates, with an international chain of shops. He wanted advertising that promoted an ethos for the brand, and in 1982 recruited Toscani as art director.
