| Editor | Benjamin Joffe-Walt |
|---|---|
| Frequency | Quarterly |
| First issue | 1991 |
| Company | Benetton |
| Country | Italy |
| Language | English, Italian, French, Spanish |
| Website | www.colorsmagazine.com |
| ISSN | 1121-824X |
Colors 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[1] by running full-page photos of the face of Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain doctored to look like a black woman, 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 U.S. president Ronald Reagan doctored to look like an emaciated AIDS patient with Kaposi's sarcoma lesions.[2]
The magazine has produced two books of photography documenting collections of interesting objects and facts from around the world (Extra/ordinary Objects and Signs book, both published by Taschen).
In 2007 Erik Ravelo, a Cuban designer, took over the creative direction of the magazine, while Benjamin Joffe-Walt became its editor. In 2009 Colors magazine became the first design/photography focused magazine to use Augmented Reality technology to "augment" printed portraits through video content.