Toscani Tested

“Should Benetton be allowed to use their corporate wealth to flaunt their political, ethical and moral opinions?”

Context

“There are three ways of looking Toscani’s work, and at the last 17 years of Benetton advertising. The first sees him as a pioneer in mass communication, no matter what his motives. The second involves the refusal of Benetton – or Toscani – to admit to any charitable giving on the back of its “social commitment” causes, and paints them as cynical and corporate and cowardly. The final way is that of NGO’s and the stars of the campaigns, like the family of David Kirby, whose death from AIDS was a famous photo and campaign in 1992: That a few thousand people saw the picture in Life magazine, but up to a billion saw the Benetton billboards. That any vehicle that gets the message across is good enough. That in a noisy world, you may as well hitch yourself to a juggernaut.” [1.]

There are probably more than three. Simplistically, in the cynical new millennium, opinions amongst photography students in a (mid-November 2006) small and random sample, are varying degrees of outrage that images like Oliviero Toscani’s (Benetton’s Art Director and Photographer) death row pictures could be used to sell woolly jumpers.

At the time the Benetton photographs were being shown on billboards throughout the UK, there was very little of this cynicism. The path of ethical and social responsibility in business, especially in retailing, had been well and very publicly trodden by Anita Roddick’s Body Shop and high street shoppers in the UK’s early 1990s were familiar with what was becoming known as ‘cause related marketing’, marketing which:

“uses sponsorship of popular issues much more for corporate image making and sales promotion than for reasons of straight philanthropy” [2.]

Boots the Chemists’ sponsorship of the Cancer Research Campaign, Shell’s promotion of young people’s sport initiatives, the companies who use the World Wildlife Fund’s panda logo, the various ribbon campaigns, Children in Need, the examples of companies who now use cause-related marketing are legion, but in the 1990s this was a relatively new phenomenon, and Luciano Benetton (Benetton’s founder and Chairman) became quickly known as a pioneer, his apparently arms-length approach to the photography of Toscani, giving him artistic freedom, was to many of his contemporary thinkers, a hallmark of a new age of corporate ethics within business.

The UK’s high streets experienced major upheavals throughout the 1990s. Large new shopping developments like Meadowhell and the Metro Centre, plus the revitalisation of many of the UK’s city centres, pushed up premises costs, pushed out the last of the independent small chain retailers, and the sector became dominated by multinationals with a major advertising budgets. Established retailers disappeared or were subsumed in a series of savage corporate takeovers, and the new players like Next, Oasis, and a plethora of prêt-a-porter designer labels began to emerge.

Within garment retailing, the logo began to predominate as an indicator of quality, cost-per-wear as a concept began to overtake the previous dominance of the sensitive price-point, low cost began to equate with low value, and high prices coupled with logos aggressively marketed in glossy magazines and billboards became ubiquitous selling tools for these highly competitive brands.

Compared to the major high street fashion retailers of the time, Benetton, with the franchise multiple model of small shops, apparently owned by local people, with products which seemed classic, timeless, almost homely, projected an innocence that their competitors lacked.

Luciano Benetton, presenting a warm, avuncular face to this family business, was Europe’s Italian Roddick, and just as ruthless in his use of cause related marketing. Toscani’s ‘All Colors’ images of black, white, brown people, very effectively differentiated the brand from the faceless, mostly white, over-glossed super-thin models on (say) the Next and Versace billboards.

The Role of the Photographer

Much has been written about the role of photographer as a deliberately passive observer to a scene, especially within the context of photojournalism, and in particular, war photography. The tension between witnessing say, a killing, taking photographs of perhaps victim and perpetrator, rather than putting down the camera and attempting to help alleviate a situation, or prevent a disaster, are recurrent discourses within the ethics of the craft.

Tom Stoddart, in his recent iWitness lecture (Gateshead, Nov 2005) [3], talked about his duty above all, to take the photograph, specifically with reference to his famine series. It is the purpose of the photographer to make the image, to serve witness above all other considerations.

Toscani took this principle to another level, seeking to document, or create or stage images which pro-actively proselytised the company’s position on a number of socio-political issues. Luciano Benetton:

“The purpose of advertising is not to sell more. It’s to do with institutional publicity, whose aim is to communicate the company’s values (..). We need to convey a single strong image, which can be shared anywhere in the world’” [4]

As a close confidant of Luciano Benetton, Toscani was given carte blanche to produce advertisements which would project the company as caring about, and engaged with international socio-political issues, and perhaps more importantly, to help differentiate the company in a fiercely competitive marketplace.

The relationship between the two men was close, and helped foster a corporate image which was successful in conveying the values of Benetton rather than creating advertising for Benetton. The difference might at first appear subtle, but the approach wasn’t lost on the consumer. Sales in the 1990s peaked in late 1999 with the Death Row campaign . Since the resignation of Toscani in 2000, the company began a steady decline. In the beginning years of the 21st century it is hard to find someone in the under-25s demographic who has heard of Benetton, or owns a Benetton garment.

Toscani’s photographs for Benetton

It is thought that Toscani’s images moved from the early people-of-all-nations portrait styles, to a later body of far edgier work, moving through an increasingly controversial set of subjects which culminated in the Death Row works. In fact, a look at the chronology of the photographs reproduced in Benetton’s online image gallery [5] shows that the United Colors theme ran throughout the years of the more newsworthy and controversial imagery. Thus the funny, friendly tongues photograph (above) ran concurrently to the more controversial image of the sticky, screaming newborn in 1991.

Strangely enough to today’s sensibilities, the newborn billboard advertisements evoked a storm of protest in the UK, was labelled shockvertising and disgusting, widely described as an image of horror, bloody, covered in blood, or blood spattered, which to today’s eyes seems odd, as it is defacto, an image of newly emergent life. The Advertising Standards Authority had a record number of complaints and warned Benetton that the photograph was ‘offensive’, so the billboards ads were removed within days.

Toscani’s photographs for Benetton are:

- high key, well saturated, colour photographs with a wide depth of field, so that all parts of the image are in focus.

- almost always close-ups

- probably shot on a Hasselblad V series (Toscani’s usual camera kit) or a Hasselblad Xpan.

- probably composed in camera, possibly cropped to format to page or billboard ratio and to incorporate the distinctive white-on-green rectangular logo

- shot on film

and

- never feature Benetton products.

The Handcuffs Photograph

Shot in 1989, in the early days of the United Colors theme of advertisements, this photograph is an early example of Toscani’s oft-professed wish to make people think. The photograph poses the question: who is the policeman, who the criminal?, and the answer is that although we are taught by our social conditioning and the popular media to think of law-enforcers as white and the perpetrators of crime as black, in fact of course we do not know.

The photo’s emergence concurrent with the photograph of the black woman breastfeeding the white baby (above) apparently set out to demonstrate that there is an intrinsic humanity in all of us that transcends skin colour. In the handcuffs photograph, we become aware that the cultural identity of both black and white peoples, their place in history, their social standing, are inextricably linked. We are tied together as peoples. The fortunes of one deeply affect the fortunes of the other.

The photograph is a tight, well framed close-up. The white background serves to emphasise both the connection between the two hands, and their separation. The image is sharply focused. We can see every hair standing up on the white hand and every crease and wrinkle on the black.

Both are dressed in the universal fabric: denim. It’s both workwear, and a democratic fashion statement, worn by all sectors of the socio-economic spectrum. Both shirt cuffs are of a thin blue cotton, the uniform of the police officer and the prison guard, as well as the garb of the inmate of nightclubs and bars, offices and boardrooms throughout the world, and of prisoners in the USA.

Both hands are lightly clenched, as if pulling away from the restriction of the handcuff, and perhaps ready to fight. The fingers are far from relaxed, and the proximity of the two figures is uneasy, although there is a balance to the photograph, which suggests some semblance of fairness, of equity. The classical thirds grid composition belies a forced albeit consenting peace, which equilibrium can be shattered at any moment. It’s as if the handcuffs, an instrument of individual restraint and social control, is acting as a bridge, of commonality between the two men. Again, what effects one, can only affect the other.

It’s a photograph which accurately represents Toscani’s work for Benetton, with its elements of a finely balanced tension, of pluralism, of an intent to make the viewer think about more than fashion, of issues that connect, and perhaps at the same time, both divide and unite us all.

These images are palpably not about shopping for brightly coloured sweaters in brightly lit shopping centres, but they are as highly coloured and as brightly lit as the shopping centres in which they are seen. Buying a fluffy pink lambswool jumper in the 1990s indicated to the crowd that somehow, the wearer ‘gets it’, that a classic pearls and twinset look can also present a major challenge to the establishment. In the fight for prominence in the high street, it’s no surprise that these adverts were influential for so many years.

Conclusions

Toscani saw himself not as an advertiser, but as a reporter-photographer. It is clear that his photography for Benetton had a major impact on the development of cause-related marketing in the 1990s and the brouhaha and closure of the Sears concessions over the Death Row photographs may in part, explain the reluctance of the advertising world to engage in so called political images as the 21st Century begins.

Toscani’s contribution to the world of advertising and art photography is now notorious. Benetton the woolly jumper manufacturer may have lost its profile in the early 2000s, but it is unlikely that these images will be forgotten in the history of photography.

Magnum’s David Hurn espouses that it’s a myth that “commerce is corrupt, art is pure”. [6] He says that “The idea that professionals are commercial hacks but artists are free and independent image-makers wipes out practically the whole history of photography”.

Certain kinds of money are equated with lack of merit. Advertising photography can also be politics, can also be worthy, can also be art, commercial work can have a conscience. Business can foster and engage art, art can support business. Commerce isn’t other- it is a part of our world, for good and for ill. The Toscani-Benetton collaboration is testament to that.

Rose George, who worked for Toscani at Colors Magazine throughout the 1990s, writes:

“..even when you have suffered from his tongue, when you have understood his faults, experienced his sexism, and hated his guts, you can’t kick the habit of admiring him. He’s awful, but he makes the world a less dull place. He’s flawed, but a noisy antidote to what Nabokov calls ‘the masonic bond of triteness.’ And the bastard’s probably invincible, anyway.” [1]

The rights to the touring Death Row photographic exhibition ‘We, on death row’ and its proceeds have been donated by Toscani to the Hands Off Cain international campaign against the death penalty. “We will look back to this kind of justice one day and we will consider ourselves very primitive,” Toscani was quoted as saying in a New Statesman article in January 2000.

Should Benetton be allowed to use their corporate wealth to flaunt their political, ethical and moral opinions? Yes, absolutely.

Toscani in an interview on CBS Worldwide, in the year he resigned, 2000: “One day they might look back on Benetton and say, ‘They understood.’”

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References:

1. Rose George on Toscani: article in Arena Magazine April 2004

2. The Stakeholder Corporation – Wheeler and Sillanpaa 1997 (pp 293)

3. iWitness – Tom Stoddart 2004

4. Benetton group: Unconventional Advertising – Senthil Ganesan – in Global CEO November 2002

5. The Benetton online images gallery

6. On Being a Photographer – David Hurn/Magnum 2004

7. Oliviero Toscani

Reproduced images © Benetton.

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[This article was originally written in answer to a set essay module in Year 1 of an undergraduate Photography Degree at Newcastle College. There may be more of these: I do like surprises.]

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