Research on Oliviero Toscani

Oliviero Toscani

''When you look at the book, you don't know if I'm a fashion photographer, an art photographer, an advertising photographer, a reporter -- I am a photographer. I'm simply a witness of my time,' Oliviero Toscani says of his new photo book, More Than Fifty Years of Magnificent Failures. Indeed, the release is a document of Toscani's truly dynamic eye. For more than five decades, his campaigns for brands like United Colors of Benetton and Esprit -- and his editorial images for glossies including Elle, Vogue, and the earliest issues of i-D -- have powerfully pushed forward the very possibilities of fashion and advertising images.'

His work for the United Colours of Benetton

'Toscani created the brand's iconic advertising campaigns, which fused poignant social commentary with simple and striking visuals. His subjects ranged from dying AIDS patients and death row inmates to political prisoners and religious clergy members of all sexual orientations and ethnicities.

'Toscani's images catapulted Benetton to stratospheric new highs, but his images were often met with threats of censorship, lawsuits, and boycotts. To this day, they're still predicated with terms like 'controversial' or 'shocking,' a term with which Toscani heartedly disagrees. 'I didn't do any shocking pictures. Where are the shocking pictures? There are some stupid people who say they're shocking but I don't think about those people,' he says. The accurate descriptor? Provocative. 'When I go to a movie, I want to be provoked. When I read a book, I want to be provoked. I want to be provoked intelligently, I want to restart my thinking, I want to ignite the engine,' he says. 'Provocation belongs to art, so if I provoke something, I'm very happy."

Benetton: A History of Shocking Ad Campaigns [PICTURES]

Alien Covenant Context

The Alien Covenant posters are very sinister and dark, they also have a very eery colour palette, consisting pretty much of just black and green. 

Context:

This video was published in February 2016, which, maybe not coincidentally, was two months before Alien Covenant started filming...

The aliens in the film burst out of people. They take over as many people as they can. On the one hand it could be suggested, like it is in the video, that Donald Trump can be compared to this invincible alien. However, Trump could also be compared to the robot, played by Michael Fassbender, who tries his best to convince the other characters that the murderous aliens taking over are actually good but just misunderstood. He also tries to create new aliens and genetically modify them to make them be  'bigger and better'. The aliens are all of the new laws and ideals Trump is putting in place and promoting, and he is the robot, trying to expand the species, help them thrive and convince people to let it continue because they're good.

SEMIOTICS

Semiotics/ semiology is a system of signs. This is a growing field of study that was originally founded by two key individuals. These were Saussure (1857-1913) and Pierce (1839-1914), who continued and worked on to grow Saussure's work and research. Saussure and Pierce both had similar theories regarding semiotics but took these in slightly different directions, developing their own ideas.

Saussure wrote that a sign is made up of two elements: the signifier, which is the physical form, the thing that is being considered, and the signified, which is what this culture has decided this form means. This means, essentially, that people all interpret things in different ways and no two people will imagine the same generic thing in the same way.

Pierce, however, believed that there were different levels of meaning attached to signs. These were; icon, which is what you can see (e.g. pictures), index, which is what you can work out (e.g. fire equals danger and symbol, which is what you can learn (e.g. flags). Pierce also said that a symbol is not necessarily just an image but can be found, also, in the forms of; words, sounds, smells, flavours, acts and objects.