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The World of United Colours
With the desire for peace in the Middle East as its theme, ‘Enemies’ is a special issue magazine published by Benetton and ‘Newsweek’. Its cover story features the 22-year old Bedouin, Musa Mazareb, and his 24-year old Israeli girlfriend, Enyar Lazarus. Their story is one of many accounts of relationships developed across the sectarian divide, such as the one of the friendship that grew up between a Jewish and a Palestinian mother after their babies were born in the same hospital.
‘It’s so simple to be human beings, look at each other and smile at each other.’ The Arab cameraman Nili Aslan (42) turns towards his Jewish colleague, Issa Freij (41). They carry heavy cameras and are wearing Benetton clothes. ‘Meeting Issa has given me a bit of hope, especially lately, since everything has been so dramatic,’ says Aslan. She replies: ‘I like working with Nili, we look at things in the same way.’
Nili Aslan and Issa Freij (see photo p. 304) are the subjects of one of the photo-features in ‘Enemies’ published last year by Benetton and Newsweek and distributed in a print run of 6 million through the American weeklies and quality European broadsheets. Its 84 colourful pages document a reality which differs sharply from the familiar image of conflict between Palestinians and Israelis. In a form reminiscent of the family album, Benetton shows how ordinary Palestinians and Israelis -women, men and children- work and play together, laugh, make music, develop friendships and fall in love.
Although the ‘models’ in ‘Enemies’ wear Benetton clothes, the magazine gives no details of prices, fabrics or sizes. Instead the images are accompanied by quotes from their subjects explaining their relation to each other.
As such, ‘Enemies’ continues Benetton’s now familiar tradition of campaigns centred on images intended to promote peace, tolerance, multiculturalism and to challenge stereotypes. Through posters, billboards, ads in the media and its own magazines, Benetton has tried to take its message to a global audience. At the same time, it has grown into Italy’s fourth largest company with an annual turnover of nearly 2 billion dollars.
The series began in 1984 with the launch of the ‘All the Colours of the World’ campaign spotlighting groups of young people of different colour and race. The campaign sparked a heated racial debate in South Africa with sections of the ‘white’ media refusing to use Benetton images showing black and white children together. It wasn’t to be the last time the company was to find itself at the centre of a storm of controversy.
The publication of a poster showing a black women breastfeeding a white baby led the black community in the US to accuse the company of perpetuating the racist stereotype of the black nanny and implicitly endorsing the subordination of black women. In its report, ‘Benetton Advertising: A Story of Prizes and Controversy’ the company responds: ‘The true spirit of the photo -that equality goes beyond knee-jerk reactions and conventional perceptions- was however understood internationally’. In fact the photo went on to become ‘the most-awarded image in Benetton’s advertising history’ the report adds.
A year later, in 1990, Benetton adopted the famous ‘United Colours of Benetton’ slogan which in combination with a series of symbolic ‘black-and-white’ images became the company’s official trademark. These have remained a constant element in Benetton’s promotional activities. As has an appetite for controversy. In 1996 the picture of two mating horses - one black, one white - once again led to expressions of outrage.
Unusually for a multinational, Benetton has not been afraid to address highly political themes. During the Cold War it ran a campaign with a photo of two black children kissing. One of them was wrapped in the Stars and Stripes, the other in the red flag of the Soviet Union. When the French president Mitterand met his Soviet counterpart Gorbachev in Paris, Benetton used the image to decorate the presidential route along the Champs-Elysées. A bemused Gorbachev is reputed to have asked, ‘Who is this Benetton anyway?’
More shocking was the 1991 picture of a World War I cemetery in France which created ‘unprecedented controversy’. Showing long rows of crosses symmetrically aligned, it served as a reminder, says company president Luciano Benetton, ‘that in wartime nobody wins: beyond uniforms and races and religions, death is the only victory’. Three years later the enterprise launched its peace campaign with an equally controversial image of the blood-soaked clothes of a soldier killed during the war in former-Yugoslavia.
It might seem paradoxical that advertising campaigns intended to promote peace and tolerance should be the cause of such a public furore. In part the strong feelings aroused by Benetton campaigns can be explained by the suspicion that the company actively seeks to promote controversy in order to raise its own profile. Critics question Benetton’s sincerity and accuse the company of exploiting suffering to boost its sales. However, this cannot alter the fact that Benetton produces ‘controversials’ -controversial commercials- that explore areas where other companies dare not go out of fear of losing their customers.
The creative force behind the Benetton images is photographer Oliviero Toscani, who began working for the company in 1982. According to Toscani his employer is actually a role model for other enterprises. ‘They tell me that I have to do a piece of communication. I think that the company of the future, the one that is to survive in the future, is the company that will have a social-political responsibility,’ he told Scotland on Sunday. In describing his relation with the clothes giant, Toscani likes to compare his situation to that of an artist such as Michelangelo who worked for the Roman Catholic Church. In fact he thinks that ‘companies are the new churches. It is only through their input that problems can be solved. Most of them prefer to remain detached. But the economy is the key to progress in the modern world,’ he said in an interview with the Independent on Sunday.
Arab cameraman Nili Aslan and his Jewish colleague Issa Freij.
Photo Oliviero Toscani
After a career spending photographing some of the world’s most famous models, in his Benetton campaigns Toscani deliberately chose to work with ordinary people. In a typically trenchant interview with The Guardian he explained the philosophy behind this unusual approach: ‘Somebody who buys a top model and uses them as a symbol is making a social political choice. It’s actually more extreme and eccentric than mine. Hitler wanted Aryans. That’s what they do with Claudia Schiffer, those fashion companies. That’s what fashion magazines do. I call them the Fourth Reich publishers. You get all the rich and beautiful. All the alienated have to disappear. Style and culture magazines are like that, and so you are going to have a society that is intolerant.’
Toscani points out that it is not Benetton, but the media that present us with a distorted image of the world: ‘We are getting further away from reality of the world. We have no point of view any more, because we read the paper, watch TV. Women have to be blond, tall and thin. Everything is based on the fact that we have to be accepted in society. Everybody needs consensus. Everything is getting flatter and flatter. People say that what I do is ‘just a provocation’. It’s not true.’
Instead of uniformity the Italian company aims to show the ‘beauty of diversity’. One of the clearest examples of this approach are the posters published in 1998 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In the form of a play-bill, surrounded by portraits of young people from all over the world, the text of art.1 reads: ‘All Human Beings Are Born Free and Equal in Dignity and Rights’.
Beyond its unique advertising campaigns, Benetton is also engaged in direct humanitarian action. Together with the French anti-racist association, SOS-Racisme, it has raised donations for some of the poorest African countries. Through the ‘Italian Associazione per la Pace’ it helps support war victims in Bosnia while in South Africa the company has organized a series of cultural workshops and seminars. In 1996 Benetton implemented ‘The Colours of Peace’, a project to supply 130,000 school children in Europe with books and posters to encourage them to be tolerant and to respect other cultures.
According to Benetton workers it is the press, religion and politics that are most to blame for creating a climate of intolerance. The press by showing negative images of conflicts, politicians for not resolving disputes and religion for frequently being the source of dispute. ‘If journalists would be artists, and if politicians would be artists, the world would be different,’ Toscani told Scotland on Sunday. And in his introduction to ‘Enemies’ Luciano Benetton wrote: ‘Conflicts aside, people want to live, buy and sell, fall in love. That which is divided by politics and religion, is united by the daily, normal qualities of life and relationships. There’s a world where bombs scatter death among ordinary people; sometimes when they’re running one of the most ordinary errands, like shopping; this is exactly where we’ve tried to record the deep longing for peace of two people divided by an endemic conflict.’
| ‘Here is the search for real people and real stories, here is the discovery of beauty without stereotypes.’ |
But others warn about the deceptive quality of images. Pictures may present a peaceful scene and create a positive atmosphere, but they don’t necessarily disclose the real feelings of people. Abraham B. Yehoshua, an Israeli writer who is active in the Peace Now Movement, writes in his introduction to ‘Enemies’: ‘But take care not to be misled. Notwithstanding the idealistic smiles and hugs in the pretty and colourful pictures, we have no way of knowing what lies deep down in the hearts of the people, Palestinians and Jews, photographed here in everyday situations. Do not be mistaken by believing that, just because they are talking to each other, laughing and patting each other on the back, they are not capable of hurting each other.’
Indeed, despite the cheerful images of friendship against the odds, some of the accompanying texts hint at deeper tensions. On the other hand Abraham Yehoshua acknowledges the value of the album when he explains the effect the pictures had on him. The most ‘shocking thing’ about looking at the photo’s was when he discovered that often he could not distinguish the Arab from the Jew. ‘And I find this so disturbing, because all my life I have been sure that it would be a simple matter for me to recognize a member of my own nation and race.’ Yehoshua: ‘Mistrust and suspicion can be dissolved and reduced by constantly breaking down stereotypes, not only of people, but also of relationships. And it is this which a book of photographs such as this one is aiming to achieve.’
Though ‘Enemies’ has a strong ‘pacifist theme’ it doesn’t mean the catalogue paints a completely rosy picture of Jewish-Palestinian relationships. Many ‘models’ talk about their despair, pain, hatred and confusion. The Palestinian technician Muhammed Nabulsi (24) explains the meaning of his relationship with his girlfriend: ‘Claire helps me put up with this rotten world, she’s the solid proof that not all Jews are our persecutors. But it’s not enough. I’m tired and frustrated at not being able to move around, at being at the mercy of any check point.’
Certainly one of the most surprising portraits is that of Zahira Kamal (52), a leader of the Intifadah, who is photographed with her Jewish friend and parliamentarian, Naomi Chazam (51). Maybe she best expresses Benetton’s idea behind the catalogue: ‘In order to create peace the involvement of each person is vital. Peace can’t be delegated to politicians. That’s why I’m in this photo, to communicate the need for peace, justice and solidarity to many people around the world.’
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j.verhoeven@euconflict.org