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Copyright 2000 The Telegraph Group Limited
SUNDAY TELEGRAPH(LONDON)
January 30, 2000, Sunday
SECTION: Pg. 03
LENGTH: 1904 words
HEADLINE: Sunday Review Features: Interview Man with a licence to shock Oliviero Toscani, whose latest Benetton campaign features Death Row prisoners, has carte blanche to portray any chilling image he likes for the clothes company. Is he a force for good or just a cynical ad man?
BYLINE: By Rebecca Tyrrel
BODY:
OLIVIERO Toscani, the man who thinks up and photographs the controversial, irritating, provocative, politically correct Benetton advertisements, says that his latest campaign featuring images of Death Row inmates in America is, of course, "a joke". "Sorry? Say that again." "Yes," he says, shaking hands effusively and settling himself behind his desk. "Didn't you realise? We made the campaign for a joke," and then he gives out a long, wheezy, fat man's laugh.He's larking around, of course. Just a little injection of misplaced fun before the grubby subject of exploitation is raised. Toscani is a likeable fellow and is deemed a genius in the advertising world. Perhaps there are those who will want to sympathise with his quest to raise awareness of difficult, taboo, humanitarian issues. But one can't help remembering all those brightly coloured sweaters he is ultimately supposed to be flogging. One can't help being confused. Is Toscani a force for good or a cynical ad man?

"Looking At Death in the Face", the latest Benetton offering, was launched in this country yesterday, scattered throughout the nation's newspaper colour supplements. The words "Sentenced to Death" are stamped across each advertisement, and of course the familiar green-and-white United Colours of Benetton logo features alongside the condemned person's image - as well as some statistics: name of prisoner, prisoner's date and place of birth, and crime.

Joking and bonhomie over with, let's get down to the nitty gritty. Is this exploitation? Toscani doesn't deny that it is, but then points at me accusingly: "Your newspaper exploits the misery of the world to sell newspapers."

"I don't think so." I replied. But he wasn't listening, he was busy expressing himself, in his rolling, broken English, his enticing treacly Italian accent thick with lots of thrumming r's.

Safe in the knowledge that my tape-recorder was picking it all up, I half closed my mind to it; let it wash over me; little waves of petulant anger - "bunch of eediots . . . load of bullsheet . . . fascist mentality . . . models are prostitutes . . ."

"Models are what?"

"Models are prostitutes. Look at the latest Harper's Bazaar - same old shit, terrible. Women should be embarrassed to look like that." (Perhaps it should be noted here that Toscani is the creative director of a rival American magazine: Tina Brown's talk.)

TOSCANI didn't always think like this, though. In the 1970s and early 1980s he was much more your regular fashion photographer. He worked, with "prostitute" models, for Vogue, Elle, Mademoiselle, Harper's Bazaar. His first advertising campaign featured a model, his girlfriend. Or rather, it featured her rear encased in the product, Jesus Jeans. It was prescient because the advertisement was banned for its legend "He who loves me will follow me."

"Aaaah," says Toscani, long and ponderously, "and you know what I discovered then? I discovered that editorial is the advertising of the advertising, that's how it is. I was talking to David Bailey last night and he agrees."

Toscani knows Bailey because he studied photography in London in the 1960s on an exchange visit from his own alma mater, the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich. ("The Sixties was nothing - just 500 people in the King's Road, terrible food and London fog," he says.) Toscani, then, the man behind the scary images is no enfant terrible. He is 59, he has seven grandchildren, he is a hulking, designer-stubbled executive of a man who had a good idea in 1983 - to sell jumpers on the back of hot political potatoes - and stuck with it.

We are talking in his office in Treviso, 40 minutes outside Venice and just a few miles from the main, brightly-coloured Benetton headquarters. The office is housed in a cream-coloured, stand-alone pavilion on campus at Fabrica (Latin for factory), Toscani's communications centre. "This was Luciano's (Benetton's) present to me," he says, with a sweeping gesture which encompasses all around him, including the massive concrete amphitheatre being built just to our right.

Fabrica is populated by budding young journalists, graphic designers, photographers and computer buffs. They are all on a scholarship, paid a salary, given food and a roof over their heads. In return, they work hard for Toscani, their guru, dreaming up new, shocking ideas for selling products and producing Benetton's own magazine, Colors, which specialises in very shocking images. One recent issue, for example, includes a used tampon, a baby sitting on her mother's corpse, a man pointing a revolver into another man's mouth, six pages of female genitalia - oh, and the Queen Mother and Mother Theresa. The theme, by the way, is motherhood.

There is a six-inch deep lake, here at Fabrica, lined with creamy-coloured, uniformly-sized pebbles. The interior design of the campus buildings is smooth and cool; this is not your average place of learning - no plastic coffee cups, overflowing ash-trays, pungent trainers, acrid common room. It is plush, comfortable, expensive. Benetton must be doing well - and my own theory is that it has nothing to do with Toscani's advertising but is because it sells good-quality, well-designed clothes, especially for children. Luciano Benetton obviously believes, on the other hand, that the success is due to Toscani, due to brand recognition, to the United Colors of Benetton logo planted so clearly on all those shocking images. Hence Fabrica, hence his absolute belief in Toscani and the instruction: "This (the Benetton image) is your toy. Do not let anyone interfere with it, even me."

The advertisements started innocently enough, though, with rows of shiny-faced, happy children of varying nationalities and cultures; the message was racial harmony and nobody minded very much. The children were even wearing Benetton clothes, which is hard to imagine in a Benetton campaign now. (The condemned prisoners in the Death Row advertisements, for example, were not obliged to wear Benetton for their photographs, although those wearing Gap shirts were asked to change their clothes.)

Since 1983, Toscani has produced, among others, the following memorable images for Benetton advertisements: a nun kissing a priest; a white man handcuffed to a black man; a black mercenary brandishing a human thigh bone; a buttock branded with an HIV positive stamp; an Arab kissing a Jew; an unwashed newborn baby with umbilical cord still in place; the death of an Aids patient; coloured condoms; a black woman breast-feeding a white baby; test tubes filled with blood (supposedly the blood of various heads of state); a black, white and Asian child sticking out their tongues to illustrate that inside we are all the same colour; genitalia of different shapes, sizes and colours to depict a society devoid of social baggage.

While Luciano and his Benetton brothers and sisters, with whom he owns the company, grappled with disconsolate franchisers and incidents involving people having Benetton clothes ripped from their backs, Toscani basked in the glow of controversy and sales still rose. He couldn't lose. People were talking about his work; what more could a photographer ask?

Oliviero Toscani says that today he does indeed want for nothing. "You are talking with the luckiest and most privileged man ever created by God," he told me. To be fair, he was referring directly to his home life on his Tuscan farm with his beautiful wife (a former model) and his beautiful children (he has six, aged from 10 to 35, from three different marriages), and the Appaloosa horses that he breeds.

But it is also true that Toscani struck it very lucky when he allied himself to Benetton. He gets away with announcing, quite regularly, that he has no interest in how many sweaters Benetton sells. He is what he describes as a "free dog" when it comes to Benetton. He answers to no one. Which all makes me wonder why the Benetton logo remains in the advertisement, if it's really not about selling sweaters.

Toscani bridles at this suggestion. "Can you imagine Michelangelo doing a church without the Pope?" he begins, "Doing a painting in the Sistine Chapel without putting in Christ?" Preposterous though the comparison is, one gets the point: Toscani needs a sponsor. But perhaps he should look for a more worthy one - one that is not associated with something as lightweight as fashion? "

NO OTHER company but Benetton would have the intelligence," he says. "Instead of investing in some top model, they are taking a risk. They are investing in something that might be economically upsetting for them. But tell me, why do people get so angry? There is such a thing as freedom of speech. Journalists make these comments and I am a journalist myself, so I know they are all writing bullshit."

Toscani says he is expecting all kinds of different responses to the latest campaign. He cites someone he refers to as a successful artist, who has already told him that this campaign is the "greatest thing he has seen", and a letter he has been sent in which Benetton is accused of being "a bunch of murderers".

A brochure containing all the images and interviews with the condemned prisoners has already been circulating in America - it came free in a polythene bag with talk magazine. A newspaper story earlier this week quoted the mother of a murder victim as saying, "It enrages me."

A representative of the North Carolina Department of Correction, which allowed Toscani access to seven of its inmates, said: "I think we were misled, we never expected to be involved in an advertising campaign. We thought it was a magazine story." Last Thursday night the campaign became a story on Channel 4 news. The controversy bandwagon has already started rolling -which is surely the desired effect.

The Death Row campaign is the culmination of two years' work for Toscani. How has it left him? How was he affected by the process of systematically photographing 26 convicted killers, facing one after the other through the lens of his camera, 26 human beings with no future, one of whom has since been executed?

"It has somehow been a very rich experience for me," he says, fiddling with his pen top, head down, suddenly talking quietly. "You are talking to people who expect to be executed and, of course, everybody has their own story - but there was one common denominator: they all had the bad luck of being born under a bad star. Some people are just born wrong - born to abuse, violence, drugs, ghettos, to be black and poor - that was it, that was the common denominator." Some might say that the other common denominator is that they are all murderers. But I didn't say that to Toscani, and just asked him if he became depressed by the assignment.

"Depressed!" he said, looking me straight in the eye. "No, I don't get depressed. Depression is self-indulgence. No, it taught me to use my life."

Toscani took his 19-year-old son Rocco with him as his assistant on this campaign. "I needed some closer support than just having an assistant. He was a great support and it was a good opportunity to show a 19-year-old boy something like that."

Perhaps that is the difference between Oliviero Toscani, the man behind the maddening advertising campaigns, and the rest of us. How many people would think Death Row a suitable place for a teenage boy or, for that matter, a suitable subject for fashion advertising?

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