In 1996, Oliviero Toscani was working for the magazine Colors in Kochi in the South Indian state of Kerala when a girl approached him on the street and asked him to take her picture. As soon as he turned his lens on her, the girl stuck out her tongue, looking wide-eyed into the camera with a mischievous expression. Her teeth and tongue were stained bright red by the betel nuts popular in the region. “The portrait is one of my favorite themes, no matter who is in front of the lens. The sitter’s gaze is key,” says Toscani. This image formed the starting point of his career in a dual sense: Oliviero began to portray unknown people from all over the world in his long-term project “Razza Humana,” and the image of a child sticking out her tongue would become a key motif of the later Benetton campaigns.
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