Oliviero Toscani and more Rosetta Stone

Last night I went to see a talk given by Oliviero Toscani. He told stories about individual photos, including the two I have included below, and expounded a bit on his thoughts on what it means to be an artist. While he certainly photographs a lot of different stuff, his focus is really on people and portraiture. Most of his best known work has been in ads. He does a lot of fashion and design work.

Some of his best known and most controversial work has been done for United Colors of Benetton. The photo below was apparently highly contested in some countries, but won a "Photo of the Year" award in another. This is far from his most controversial work for them. He did a lot of ads for Benetton that were direct commentaries on current events. His explanation of this was interesting. He pointed out that the ads in newspapers and magazines don't go with the articles, in terms of content or style. He wanted his ads to address real issues.

Anyway, it was an interesting talk, and I am glad I went!

Rosetta Stone Italian 1 Unit 2 Lesson 2: So far so good. I should really time myself to see how long these Rosetta Stone lessons take. They feel like an eternity. More work with pronouns in this lesson, and then, prepositions! To me, prepositions are a core vocab thing. There aren't that many that people use commonly, but they are used a lot. Things are "on" or "in" a lot. With the pronouns, they are using family relationships as the nouns. As in Questi sono i miei fratelli "these are my brothers." I quite importantly learned the word for sister, sorella.