Oliviero Toscani

Yes, you are right; I studied Photography because everybody in the family was a photographer. Not only my father, but my oldest sister too. I chose Zurich because I thought it was the best school for photography and graphics at the time, and it also gave me the opportunity to learn German.

I am not a photographer. I use photography, but I am an author. Everybody can write and read, but how many poets are there? Do you know what I mean? You want to write because you wish to create a poem. I don’t take pictures just for the sake of taking pictures. I do take pictures because it is the way I can express myself. I am a witness of my time. Through photography is how I do produce a trace of time. Some people do it with writings, some others with music, many others with movies or even making shoes. As I said, photography for me is a means of expression, is not my art. I am not a masturbated photographer. Photography is the most modern way of documenting today, and millions of photographs surround us.

Precisely, we don’t know what the reality is anymore. All we know is a picture of what is supposed to be real. We don’t live in reality any longer. We don’t need it. We get to know things because we have seen them in images but we don’t go there and see them in real. Photography is like the human memory. Since the existence of photography – around 150 years ago – we know the history of humankind. Before, we didn’t know it, we imagined it, we painted it or described it with words. My favourite artist ever is Goya, but he was a painter, not a journalist, neither a documentary of the facts.

This is what I mean. If there had been a camera in the time of Jesus Christ, probably the Bible would not have been written and the Gospel would not be as it is now.

We decided to switch to more overtly political images in 1991. I moved away from the original intention of advertisement, the presentation of clothes, and I succeeded. The only conventional trait of the ads was the presence of Benetton’s green logo. In this particular case it was a simple image, using only a black and white contrast, the black of the priest’s clothing and the nun dressed in white, a white that fades into the white of the background. The public felt offended. In Italy, and due to pressure from the Vatican, the use of the image was finally prohibited and the French authorities demanded the removal of the posters. Besides the aesthetics of the photograph, the clear subject of the ad was to increase social consciousness.

No, I don’t think it’s a representation of a Pietà, it’s just news photography applied to advertising – the image appeared in Life magazine one year before. I don’t know why this image made a big scandal too. We tried to keep the thing differently and again increase the social awareness about AIDS, so present in that decade. But of course, things haven’t changed that much. There is the world of consumption and there is the world of the news. Today people actually are getting killed in Aleppo and we don’t care. Instead we go and buy Prada, a perfume, whatever. This is the way it is.

Yes. This particular Benetton advertisement tried to make a statement about race. There are three hearts overprinted with the words ‘white’, ‘black’ and ‘yellow’ representing three races. It suggests that we are all the same, even in death. By the way, the organs used were actually pig hearts.

At the time when the campaign was presented, a journalist told me that the photograph I mounted was not real. As I explained before, I answered that it is even better than the real. If there’s no camera, there is no reality. The photo causes more fear than the true image and because of this photography is the only objectionable art medium. In the case of the Balkans War, the main theme in all newspapers and magazines in 1993 was the divorce of Prince Charles and Lady Di. Then I got a letter from a 22 years old girl from Sarajevo where, among other things, she said to me, “Mr. Toscani, every time you take care of something everybody talks about it. The world has to talk about this war.” Then I wondered how I could conceive an image about Bosnia that summarized the whole conflict, and I thought of Marinko Grago, the dead Croatian soldier that appeared in the news, and his uniform full of blood. You see death, but not the shots. There is a dynamic without needing to move anything. The advertising channel was more powerful than the report itself.

This campaign was a breaking point in my career, yes. As everybody knows it was the end of my relationship with Benetton. The campaign was not popular. Luciano was the only one defending me. However the company was only interested in selling t-shirts and for that reason I left. My goal still today is to achieve a universal United Nations moratorium to end death penalty.

Well, for sure. It is probably better to be born in Italy than in the desert. As a child I played in a square with Baroque and Renaissance churches around me. This is preferred than some place where there is no culture at all. But first of all, it is not my country. I don’t have a country. I was born here but I didn’t choose it. I am not proud of things that I didn’t choose. I am proud of the things I do choose. I didn’t choose to be male, Italian, 1,87m tall. I didn’t even choose to be a photographer. I didn’t choose any of that, it just happened. However, when I choose or I do have a choice, I really feel better.

I just wanted to do my own personal magazine, the magazine I would have liked to find in the newsstands. There was no magazine like that at the time. Almost thirty years ago, Colors was a magazine without news and without celebrities; with random people and no news. Now you can find something similar because Colors existed, but before Colors, something like that had never been done in a publication. So that was an experiment. I did the forty first issues and then I left Colors, Fabrica and Benetton.

Fabrica was created not as a school but as an art workshop, like in the Renaissance. I never wanted a school. I wanted to do something special, a distinct place where people could learn and share. And no, I am not in contact with them. I do my own workshops now. I don’t even know what they do at present. Let me explain that before Benetton I did another campaign that was much more important. You probably don’t know about it because there was no a big budget. It was the campaign for Jesus Jeans, to which I also gave the name. The campaign had a picture of a girl from the back with very shorts hotpants and a phrase signed by Jesus, “He who loves me, follows me” – a quote from the Gospel of St. Matthew. This was in 1972. It was very popular and also a big scandal among the religious people in Italy and America. The great Pier Paolo Pasolini defended me on this project writing an article in the newspaper. He said, “The Jesus of the blue jeans beat the Jesus of the Vatican.”

I also did all of the Fiorucci stuff before Benetton, but everybody knows Benetton because it was very popular.

Yes, maybe. For too long actually. Back to the question, luxury brands are very boring. I mean, it depends on how you conceive the work. When I did Chanel, I did the first picture of Inès de la Fressange. Karl Lagerfeld didn’t discover Claudia Schiffer, I photographed Claudia much before Lagerfeld. I did the first pictures of all these girls and, to be honest, I never thought that they would become top models. When they did I stopped being interested in them. I also brought Monica Bellucci from Milan to Paris and she did her first cover for Elle magazine with me. This is what I like to do, to photograph faces that are new, faces that are not overused because they get boring for me. I like to use fresh new faces. Big brands like to have famous people because they are much more commercial.

Look, I am not looking for ideas. I think people looking for ideas don’t have them. I am not looking for ideas. I don’t look for inspiration. I just see how the real situation is. I am a situationist, a classic situationist. The situationists believed in individual expression through directly lived experiences. I am a man of my time.

No, not at all. You have to be subversive always. You have to subvert all the time, every day. You have to ask yourself constantly and start every day from the beginning. You cannot be politically correct if you are an artist. If you are politically correct you cannot produce anything interesting, maybe it’s OK with the form, with the aesthetics, with the colour, but working in favour of the system is boring, mediocre. Anyone looking for consensus produces mediocrity.

Of course. We are afraid, we are too rich, too accommodate and boring. We like comfort. We want to have success. We are terrorized of not having enough money, afraid to start from scratch. We are conformists. Everybody is trying to get his or her own comfort, and everybody attempts to please one another. There is the idea that by pleasing you will be more successful. I don’t care about critics anymore, I don’t care what people think about my work. I know what to do. I feel what I need to do. The financial success is the only important thing today and because of this we are losing the sense of life. Life is living us instead of we living our lives. We are all carried away by other people’s images, we cannot picture our own life. We live constantly on other people’s imagination.

Of course, I just told you. We live in fiction. We don’t live the reality any more. We are afraid of war and terrorists. Nevertheless, who knows the war? There’s always been wars and terrorists. We just believe what the media is telling us. We live the reality through imaginary, depending on what other people is photographing, selecting and editing for us – as mentioned many times during our conversation. We know nothing; we just know images of everything. The reality only exists through the lens of the camera.

For sure. I did the first online magazine. The thing is that now we are all connected. Before we would have met and talked in person, and now we are doing the interview through the internet, what else can I say? We can see each other but we cannot touch or smell. This is just the first level of communication. This is a different way of perceiving human relations.

I call them total social bullshit.The only good thing that social media have made is to put all idiots together in alphabetical order. I am not even on Facebook, what a waste of time!

It is going really well. As soon as I have a couple of free days I go somewhere and take pictures of people. I do it myself traveling through the five continents. I think that racism is everywhere, in poor and rich countries, in democratic and non-democratic regimes. You can find racists in very civilized countries as Sweden or Switzerland. Racism does not have a passport. Even in Africa they are racists with their own neighbours. 

Classists and then racists. The world is primarily divided between the rich and the poor.

Sorry, but no. I am not a policeman taking ID portraits. I do take care of the aesthetic of photography, it’s in black and white, and I try to photograph the soul of people. When I arrive at a place, I normally locate myself in a square, I set up my white background and I ask people passing by if I can take a picture of them. It’s as simple as that. As you see, I am not trying to classify, as I don’t choose them, it is merely chance.

I think humanity is moving very slowly towards being civilized. We are not civilized yet and the road to civilization is going to be still very long and hard. We have to go through a lot of issues still, but it is getting better. It’s not true that some time ago it was better. This is only nostalgia. I don’t think the past was better at all. We didn’t live better. We have to go through crisis, a lot of blood, incomprehension, racism or uncivilized behaviour. However, we are on the right road, the road of civilization. Related to Trump, let’s see what is he going to do. I am sure the US is strong and democratic enough to put him down if he tries to make a mess.

I admire Luis Buñuel, Goya, and all these wonderful Spanish painters. I love architect Frank Lloyd Wright and many other people. From my generation, Bob Dylan and Mohamed Ali – both of them are my age and the latter specifically has been a big inspiration for me. Dylan spoke with songs the way I do see life and Ali acted the way I do think people should act, because he mixed sport, politics and ethics. This is very important in a person. And again, this is what we all should do. A real artist has to do with sociopolitical problems.

I am totally ignorant about contemporary art facts. I don’t go to museums anymore, neither to the movies since a long time ago, and I don’t even have a TV at home. I have to tell you that I hate this kind of violence, gratuitous violence in film today. I cannot stand that, it’s too easy. I don’t know what’s really fashionable at this time; I don’t follow that.   At the moment I am like Kaspar Hauser, the guy that grew up in a cell in complete isolation.

I just finished From Animals into Gods: A Brief History of Humankind, written by Harari in 1911.

I have a program in the radio, RAI 1, where I talk about photography. This summer I am doing a series of workshops called Never Ending Photo Master Class. We will be starting in Italy, Rimini and Rome, but it’s going to be international.

I don’t have free time. My work is my hobby or the other way around, I do everything as a job. I live on a farm, I do breed horses and I produce wine.  I would like to finish with a poem by Walt Whitman, Beginners:

How they are provided for upon the earth, (appearing at intervals,)
How dear and dreadful they are to the earth,
How they inure to themselves as much as to any – what a paradox appears their age, 
How people respond to them, yet know them not,
How there is something relentless in their fate all times,
How all times mischoose the objects of their adulation and reward,
And how the same inexorable price must still be paid for the same great purchase.