Black Sugar
Red Blood

Luigi Toscano

The photographer and filmmaker Luigi Toscano is a late-comer with an eventful past. As a roofer, doorman and window cleaner, the son of Italian immigrant workers experienced his environment from the most diverse perspectives. It is unusual for this to develop into an artistic career. But for Luigi Toscano it was a necessity, because the many visions and stories in his head must be shared and told. With photography, Toscano is able to capture his view of things. In his early works, the self-taught photographer concentrated mainly on the observation and depiction of still scenes and objects. With growing self-confidence, however, photographing people became the focus of his work.

The photographer Luigi Toscano is guided by „respect“ and „humility“-two old-fashioned-sounding virtues that have long accompanied him as a human being. „Colorblind“ (2003) is Luigi Toscano‘s first exhibition. And with his series „72 Hours“, for which he roamed through Mannheim, New York, Shanghai and Tehran, among other places, he has established his role as a photographer. Even outside the exhibition rooms, his black-and-white images can be found in a wide variety of contexts – as CD covers, flyers and in the illustrated book „Backstage,“ which portrays the comedian Bülent Ceylan. Or on pizza boxes. With the Pizzart project, Luigi Toscano also brings his art to the people as a cardboard box and at the same time delivers the pizza from the self-built wood-fire-oven.While Luigi Toscano‘s love for deep and detailed photographs has continued to grow, a new passion has developed.Moving objects, which are increasingly coming into focus, demand a new form of expression in the form of filming. Since 2006, Luigi Toscano has therefore also been active as a filmmaker. This was followed by projects for various musicians, including Laith Al-Deen, and the award-winning image movie „Wir sind Mannheim. „Transmission“ is Toscano‘s first cinema film, which premiered in 2009.

2013 marks the ten year anniversary of his first exhibition „Colorblind“. Since 2014, Luigi Toscano has been portraying Holocaust survivors around the world for his project LEST WE FORGET. More than 500 of these encounters have already taken place in Germany, the USA, Austria, Ukraine, Russia, Israel, France, Poland and Belarus. 2021 Therefore, Luigi Toscano was appointed as UNESCO Artist for Peace in 2021. He became the first photographer worldwide to receive this honor. In September of the same year, Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier awarded him with the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. The documentary of the same name, LEST WE FORGET, premiered at the 2019 Seattle International Film Festival and was shown on all Alaska Airlines flights betweenJune and July 2019.