My Gallery of Che Guevara

THIRTY-FIVE years after his death, Ernesto Che Guevara, the popular revolutionary hero who was killed by United States-trained militiamen in the Bolivian jungles in 1967, continues to inspire people aspiring for social change.

 

His extraordinary courage and passionate devotion to the cause of social change throughout the world have made him a revolutionary icon. Nothing symbolises this better than a photograph of him taken at a memorial service on March 5, 1960, in Havana, Cuba. No other image - apart from the one of Marilyn Monroe standing at a subway grid - has been reproduced as many times in history. That photograph of Che, with his long hair flowing from underneath his beret with a star affixed to it, his eyes gazing into the distance, can be found on posters, subway walls and countless consumer articles such as T-shirts, mugs, key chains, wallets and cigarette lighters all over the world. It also adorns walls across Cuba where Che is loved for the part he played in the cause of the revolution.

 

 

Alberto Korda:

However, the man who took that photograph, Alberto Diaz Gutierrez, known to the world as Alberto Korda, never made anything for himself from the image he gave the world. Korda was born in 1928, the same year as Che Guevara. He died in May 2001 while attending one of his many exhibitions round the world, in Paris. The life of the photographer reflected the transformation that the revolution effected in Cuban society.

 

 

This is how he described it to Pacifica: "This photograph is not the product of knowledge or technique. It was really coincidence, pure luck." Korda was one among the 20 to 30 photographers below the grandstand that day and Che made a brief appearance at the front of the stage, for barely a minute. Korda managed to take just two shots of Che - one horizontal and one vertical. He rejected the vertical shot because a head covered Che's shoulder; he cropped the horizontal shot and gave it to Revolucion. French writers Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were among those present at the memorial service for 136 people killed in an explosion that destroyed a vessel loaded with weapons for the Cuban government.

 

 

Ironically, Revolucion did not use Korda's pictures of Che; it carried his other pictures, of Castro and Sartre and Beauvoir. The Che pictures remained forgotten until after his death in Bolivia. In 1967, before Che's death an Italian publisher, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who gained fame for publishing in the West the first edition of Dr. Zhivago, authored by Russian writer Boris Pasternak, met Korda in Havana. Korda gave Feltrinelli two prints of the Che pictures as a gift. Four months after Che's death, in October 1967, Feltrinelli used the picture for the cover of Che's diaries, which he published. Korda said that the publication of his pictures of Che "was like an explosion in the world of photography".

 

The revolt of students in France in May 1968 and the growing radicalisation provided a fertile ground for anybody wanting to sell Che's image. Within a short time more than two million posters using the Che picture came into circulation in Europe, some of them said to be copyrighted by Feltrinelli. Years later, Korda refused to bear any bitterness about Feltrinelli. He is said to have remarked: "I still forgive him, because by doing what he did, he made it famous."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yes!, This is also Che... If you didn't knew..Read a Book!! to find out why, when and how.