Bologna, in the prestigious venue of Palazzo Albergati, hosts until September 4, 2022 the exhibition Oliviero Toscani. 80 Years as a Situationalist, curated by Nicolas Ballario and inaugurated in the year of the photographer’s eightieth birthday.
Oliviero Toscani, Photographer by Vocation
Oliviero Toscani was born in Milan on February 28, 1942.
He immediately shows talent for photography, influenced by his father, the first photojournalist of the Corriere della Sera.
At just 14 years old, he published his first photograph in the Corriere: the subject was Rachele Mussolini during her husband’s burial in Predappio. In 1965, he graduated in photography and graphics from the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich. These are the beginnings of Toscani’s extraordinary career, now celebrated in this exhibition.
Oliviero Toscani, Situationalist
This is how the photographer defines himself, and it is also the title of the exhibition currently at Palazzo Albergati, where over 100 photographs are displayed.
Why situationalist?
Because he claims to always arrive unprepared at his sets and to look around, capturing the moment. Only then does he shoot.
His career is marked by significant collaborations, the most famous and enduring being with Benetton, which began in 1982: iconic is the photograph of the jeans with the famous monster “Follow Me If You Love Me” from 1973 – visible in the exhibition – which challenged the entire advertising system and shook public opinion of those years.
The exhibition, conceived as a retrospective, presents this artist and the revolutions he has initiated.
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Oliviero Toscani has had the courage to tackle themes such as racism, the death penalty, AIDS, war, sex, violence and also religion, with the unforgettable shot from 1992 – again for Benetton – of a priest kissing a nun, and then in the early 2000s the theme of anorexia capturing in No Anorexia, in 2007, Isabelle Caro, a French model weighing only 31 kilos whose body became the symbol of the illness that afflicted her for fifteen years and which unfortunately took her life a few years later.
Iconic Portraits
Toscani is also the photographer of portraits, which we find displayed in the exhibition.
His lens has captured the faces of the most charismatic and well-known figures of the century and the idols of the culture of the ’70s: from Mick Jagger, Lou Reed, Carmelo Bene, Monica Bellucci, Don Milani, Federico Fellini to Andy Warhol, whom Toscani remembers with sincere affection.
Human Race
Oliviero Toscani. 80 Years as a Situationalist also tells the story of Human Race, a project that Toscani has been working on for the past fifteen years.
He has photographed more than 80,000 people in squares around the world, creating the largest archive of images ever existed.
Human Race is a collective project that, thanks to the collected shots, gives us a set of images symbolizing the coexistence of differences among human beings.
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