ADVERTISING AND SOCIAL ISSUES: UNITED COLORS OF BENETTON
The images are not labeled in any way (according to museum staff the necessary information did not accompany the prints), so it’s impossible to tell for sure when they were made and by whom. However, a helpful piece of wall text by museum staffer Karen Burstein helps us a bit with the chronology by sketching the history of the campaign.
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Focusing on the “real world” rather than a fashion-magazine utopia, the 1992 campaign was apparently devoted to portrayals of human disaster. One black-and-white image, originally published in Life magazine, was reincarnated in color for a Benetton ad. It depicts AIDS activist David Kirby near death, surrounded by mourning family members. Another picture features a corpse resting in a trail of blood. A third, vertical image depicts a freight ship teaming with Albanian refugees.
But despite the apparent political content of the disaster ads, they’re remarkably shallow. Because we cannot put the pictures into their contexts, they cannot really tell us stories. What’s happened to these people? we ask. Who are they? What’s to be done? It is precisely this ambiguity that makes the photos effective as advertising: we remember them because we’re not quite sure what we’re seeing.
