oliviero toscani, welcome to hardtalk, and thank you for inviting me into your home. i must begin by asking, how are you? because we know that you've been struggling with illness. lately, not so good. lately... you know, i belong to a generation that's forever young. yes! and then, it was like that until two days before i got to 80. i was working like before. then you got up in the morning, and you are 80. and suddenly you felt your age. yeah. let's begin by going back in time. when do you think, as a boy, as a young man, when did you first understand the power of photography? well, my father used to be a photographer for the corriere della sera. the big italian newspaper. at that time, there wasn't any television. and of course, it was during the regime, the fascist regime. mussolini was still alive. yeah. and in italy, the photography was conditioned by that. but my father had a relation with, ithink, keystone in london, and he used to send pictures that normally would have been censored here. and he had a relation with that british photo agency. news agency, yeah.