Colors (magazine)  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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Colors magazine [1] [2] is a multilingual quarterly magazine developed in Italy by Fabrica, Benetton's research center. There are three editions published: French/English, Italian/English, and Spanish/English. Each issue has a theme and covers the topic from an international perspective. The magazine is known for its photoessays and features a sardonic point of view (similar to Benetton advertising).

Tibor Kalman and Oliviero Toscani created the magazine in 1991, and it was produced at Kalman's design studio, M&Co, in New York City until 1993, when the magazine operations moved to Rome, Italy. For the first three years, the magazine was published in five editions: French/English, Spanish/English, Italian/English, German/English, and Japanese/English.

Issue 4, released in spring 1993, covered the topic of race, and created an international uproar by running full-page photos of the face of Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain doctored to look like a black woman [3], filmmaker Spike Lee as a white man, Pope John Paul II as Asian, among others.

Issue 7, released in early 1994, covered AIDS in a bluntly straightforward manner, something no other form of media had been willing to do until that time. It also caused a huge uproar because it featured a full-page photograph of the face of former US president Ronald Reagan [4][5] doctored to look like an emaciated AIDS patient with Kaposi's sarcoma lesions.

The magazine has produced two books of photography documenting collections of interesting objects and facts from around the world (1000 Extra/ordinary Objects and 1000 Signs), both published by Taschen).

External links

• Colors Magazine official website