Artistic strategies in Oliviero Toscani's advertising

In this article, we will discuss how contemporary advertising becomes the territory where various artistic expressions contribute in a complementary way to the constitution of the meaning of a work. The case study will approach the activity of Oliviero Toscani, and his two decades of collaboration with Benetton materialized in memorable advertising campaigns that rewrote the visual history of contemporary advertising. We will analyze how photographic media provides advertising with one of the most consistent expressive resources, based on the realism of the image, the endless possibilities in managing the visual composition, the premises of reproducibility and, last but not least, the appetite of an audience eager for the technological image. Also, we will try to discuss the creative premises and mechanisms that characterize Toscani’s creation, the reading conditions of his advertising works, as well as how his creative strategies combine the expressiveness of the technological precision of press photography, and the appropriation strategies specific to artistic post-modernity.