Pixiq

"Forget the camera, forget the lens, forget all of that. With any four-dollar camera, you can capture the best picture." Alberto Korda

The picture of the Argentine born Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara is the most famous, most reproduced image in the world. You see it on tee-shirts, bedspreads and baseball caps and as Richard Castle of the Brisbane Times wryly observed "strolling down Brunswick Street or Chapel Street, it could be easy to think Che Guevara was the only man under 40 never to have worn a Che Guevara T-shirt".

The pictures in the gallery represent a fraction of the ways the image has been used. In 2008 a documentary movie was made just about the photograph itself. It was the first photographic image ever to go “viral.” The story of how this photograph was made and how it came to be an iconic image is a fascinating look into the role of photography in popular culture.

It was taken over fifty years ago by Alberto Diaz Gutiérrez , who was known as “Alberto Korda.” Born in Havana in 1928, he learned photography as a studio assistant photographing weddings, baptisms and funerals. In 1953 he and another photographer opened their own studio and took on fashion and advertising assignments and within a few years “Studio Kordas” was the premiere fashion studio in Cuba. Interestingly, Korda a plain spoken man readily admitted that he chose fashion photography because, “My main aim was to meet women.”

He enjoyed this success until 1960 when everything changed, “Nearing 30, I was heading toward a frivolous life when an exceptional event transformed my life: the Cuban Revolution,” he says.

Soon the fashion photographer was a photojournalist documenting the revolution. He became friends with Fidel Castro and that relationship gave him access to its leadership and inner workings.

As Korda tells the story of the photo he had gone to cover the funeral services for the 160 victims of an explosion (“sabotage” he says) on a French ship  that had brought arms to Havana. It was March 5, 1960 and Castro was there with the French writers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Korda was shooting for the newspaper Revolución and working his way through the crowd he was about 25-30 feet away from the speakers when he noticed that Guevara, who had been standing in the back of the platform, had now come forward.

“I remember his staring over the crowd down 23^rd street, “Korda says. He was struck by Guevara's expression which showed he says, "absolute implacability" as well as anger and pain. Korda managed to take two frames, one vertical and one horizontal before Che stepped away.

Korda processed the film and sent prints to Revolución whose editor used a different one (that of Castro, Sartre and de Beauvoir) to illustrate the article. Years passed and Korda made only of few copies of the image which he gave to friends as gifts.

Then in 1967 Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, an Italian publisher (Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer) came to Korda with a letter of introduction from the Cuban government asking Korda's assistance in finding a portrait of Che. Korda pointed to a print of the 1960 shot hanging on the studio wall and said that it was the best one he had ever taken of Che. Feltrinelli ordered two prints and when he came by to pick them up the next day, Korda told him that because he was a friend of the revolution he did not have to pay for them.

Mysteriously, the photo appeared in Paris Match magazine in August, 1967 in an article "Les Guerrilleros" by journalist Jean Lartéguy. It was not credited and no one  knows how the magazine got hold of it. Also at about this time an Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick used the image for a color poster. Fitzpatrick claims that he got the photo from the Dutch anarchist group “The Provos” who said that they got the image from Sartre.

Then in October of 1967 Che was executed in Bolivia and demonstrations broke out around the world condemning the murder. Feltrinelli printed up thousands of posters of the image that were then distributed and appeared in these events around the world.

The photo now called Guerrillero Heroico, then turned up in 1968 on New York City subway billboards as a painting by artist Paul Davis advertising the February issue of the Evergreen Review magazine.

Because there was no copyright on the photo (Fidel never believed in copyright laws and never signed international copyright agreements) Korda and the Guevara family never made a penny from the billions of reproductions of it. And the lack of copyright meant that anyone could use it and the more it was used, the more it was seen and the more it got used again.

Addressing the image's ubiquitous nature and wide appeal, the Maryland Institute College of Art called the picture,” a symbol of the 20th century and the world's most famous photo.” The Victoria and Albert Museum adds that the photo has been reproduced more than any other image in photography.

Since PIXIQ is about photography let’s take a moment to look more closely at Korda’s original photograph and compare it to the iconic image.

Korda has said about  it that, " this photograph is not the product of knowledge or technique. It was really coincidence, pure luck."

While luck may have played a role in the making of this photograph so did preparation and skill. On that day in March, 1960 Korda wasn’t using a $4 camera, he was working with a  professional Leica M2 and a 90mm Leica telephoto lens.

Looking at the image you get some hints of the basic techniques that give the image its power.To begin with it was Korda himself who cropped the original frame into a vertical portrait eliminating distracting elements. Korda shot the image on Plus-X film which is a slower Black and White film (ISO 125) than Kodak’s Tri-X (ISO 400) favored by most photojournalists. I suspect that Korda used Plus-X because as a fashion photographer he preferred it in his fashion studio work, taking advantage of its longer tonal scale. Because of using Plus-X the original photo has lots of rich skin tones. In the iconic image the contrast is higher, emphasizing and  sharpening the features and increasing the graphic quality. Guevara’s face loses its skin tones and its individuality but it gains universality.

The 90mm moderate telephoto lens Korda used flattened Che’s facial features and thinned it. Judging from other photos of Guevara at this age, he often seems a bit chubby, his face is soft and round. Shooting slightly upwards at Che, who is looking off into the middle distance, Korda captures in his image the look of a Hollywood glamour shot. This fits his subject perfectly for as Lawrence Osborne, writing in the New York Observer, wrote,

"Che was the revolutionary as rock star. Korda, as a fashion photographer, sensed that instinctively, and caught it.”

Today most people who wear clothes or have items with Guevara’s image have no idea who he was or what he stood for. Che’s revolution is history, Communism is dead and Cuba's a speck in the ocean that few care about. The image has lost its connection to that moment and those circumstances.

Now as Darrel Couturie, Korda’s representative, puts it, "the image (is) of a very dashing young man."

With his beret linking him to the common people and his faraway look, the photo has a mythic quality that is compelling. Like images of Buddha or Christ, Che is staring off into the distance at something unknown. He has morphed into one of Joseph Campbell’s “Heroes With a Thousand Faces.” And as Campbell points out, part of the hero’s path often involves his recognition and acceptance of his own early death.

As the image spread around the world, Alberto Korda continued to work as Castro’s personal photographer for another ten years. He received no royalties from the picture and in later years turned to underwater photography. In 2001 while setting up an exhibition of his work in Paris he suffered a heart attack and died. He is buried in Havana.

Time changes our perspective on things and recently Che's daughter Aleida commented that "the ubiquitous exploitation" of Che Guevara’s image as a fashion trend would have made her revolutionary father laugh. Then she added that,

"He probably would have been delighted to see his face on the breasts of so many beautiful women."

So ends the revolution.