Oliviero Toscani is an Italian photographer, perhaps best-known worldwide for designing controversial advertising campaigns for Italian brand Benetton from 1982 to 2000. One of his most famous campaigns included a photo of a man dying of AIDS, lying in a hospital bed surrounded by his grieving relatives. He has also created advertising campaigns for Esprit, Chanel, Fiorucci and Prenatal. As a photographer he has worked for, amongst others, Elle, Vogue, GQ, Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, and Stern. In 1990 he co-founded the magazine Colors. In 2005, five years after his resignation from Benetton following the controversy over a campaign featuring scenes from death row in the USA, he sparked controversy again with his photographs of men participating in homosexual behaviour for an advertising campaign for the men’s clothing brand Ra-Re. His work has been exhibited in modern art museums across the world, including those in Mexico City, Helsinki, Rome, Lausanne and Frankfurt. He has won four Leone d’Oro at the Cannes festival, the UNESCO Gran Prix and a variety of awards from the Art Directors Club in New York, Tokyo and Milan. He is currently involved in running a research facility for modern communication in Tuscany called La Sterpaia.

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