Alberto Korda and Che Guevara

A posting was devoted to Alberto Korda, the Cuban photographrt who took to shot of Che Guevara which has become world famous. Alejo Orvañanos tells us that he died in Pais on May 25, 2001.  Presumably he had broken with the Castro regime.  Alejo attaches a biography from which here is the report that he was the photographer of the Castro revolution and that his 1960 picture of Che Guevara is considered by critics to be one of the 10 best portrait photographs of all time: Al triunfo de la Revolución trabajó en el periódico Revolución y acompañó al Comandante en Jefe Fidel Castro como fotógrafo en distintos recorridos.  En 1960 realizó el retrato El Guerrillero Heroico (Ernesto "Che" Guevara), considerado por los críticos como uno de los diez mejores retratos fotográficos de todas las épocas y la fotografía más reproducida de la historia de la fotografía mundial.

Randy Blaxk fills in details about Korda, the photographer who made the famous portrait of Che. Warning; do not confuse his with another Cuban, our beloved  Alberto Gutierrez.  The similarity of namesis odd. Are they related?  Randy says: Korda, whose real name is/was Alberto Diaz Gutierrez, started out as a fashion and advertising photographer in Havana (his birthplace) during the Batista regieme of the mid-1950s. He later served as Castro’s personal photographer until about 1968, and remained friends with Castro until his death. Gutierrez took the name Korda after a Hungarian filmmaker whom he admired, but only for about a decade.
 
The interesting sidebar on the Che Guevara photo is that by 1960, Korda had taken a job as a newspaper photographer in Havana. Che Guevara showed up unexpectedly at the rally for some dead sailors, and Korda snapped two shots of the guy, but the editor of the rag he worked for did not publish the photo, opting for photos of Castro and a few others. Seven years later, a man knocked on Korda’s door and asked about a photo he had heard of, the so far unpublished one of Che. The visitor passed himself off as a friend of Castro. Korda gladly gave him a copy for free. The visitor turned out to be Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, the same guy who smuggled the manuscript of Dr. Zivago out of the USSR. Later, when Guevara died, the Italian went on to publish the Che Guevara poster to the tune of 2 million copies but Korda was up the creek as far as royalties since Castro had not signed the Berne Convention. Feltrinelli always published the photo using his own name as the copyright owner. The reason that Cuba was not part to the world copyright convention? Castro called the protection of intellectual property as imperialistic bullshit.  (His words, not mine.)
 
Much later, about 2000, a British ad agency used the Che photo in an advertising campaign for Smirnoff vodka. Korda sued and won a $50,000 settlement which he donated to Cuba’s medical system. He was in Paris in 2001 for an exhibition of his work when he died of a heart attack at age 72. Now you know the rest of the story.

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