By Achy Obejas, Tribune staff writer. Tribune news services
contributed to this report. Chicago
TribuneMay 26, 2001
Cuban photographer Alberto Korda, whose 1960 portrait of guerrilla legend
Ernesto "Che" Guevara became an icon for would-be revolutionaries
worldwide, died Friday in France. He was 72.
Mr. Korda's daughter, Norka Korda, said from her Havana home that her father
died of a heart attack in Paris, where an exhibition of his work was being
shown.
"He was such a fun person. We have good memories," she said.
Before becoming Fidel Castro's chronicler, Mr. Korda had been Cuba's
foremost fashion photographer in the 1950s.
"His images of the Cuban revolution are remarkable because he was
deliberate in presenting the leaders in human terms," said Darrel Couturier
of Couturier Gallery in Los Angeles, which has represented Mr. Korda in the U.S.
"He understood that there was need to get sympathy, to engender support
from the rest of the world. And so he never pictured the leaders in stances of
power, but always in relaxed poses, as human beings, but, of course, very
charismatic. When he switched from fashion to the revolution, he approached two
very different subjects with the same eye."
In addition to his famous Che portrait--one of the 20th Century's best-known
images--Mr. Korda captured Castro and Guevara playing golf, boating and in other
leisurely poses. "Fidel en Washington" captures an awe-struck Castro
on his first U.S. trip as a head of state staring up at the Lincoln Memorial.
These and other images are part of a traveling show that Couturier curated.
It now is at the Museum of North Dakota in Grand Forks and will open at the
Govinda Gallery in Washington this summer.
"We were inspired by the art he made during the early days of the
revolution but also through the years," said Roy Boyd, whose Chicago
gallery presented Mr. Korda in a two-person show last June with Jose Figueroa,
Mr. Korda's longtime assistant and friend and a well-known photographer in his
own right.
The shot of Guevara staring defiantly from under his black, one-starred
beret at a funeral in Havana was the defining moment of his career and the most
famous image of the revolution.
Mr. Korda made the picture at a funeral rally on March 5, 1960, for 136
people killed in a boat explosion.
Remarkably, the photo was rejected for publication by Mr. Korda's newspaper,
Revolucion, in favor of pictures of Castro and French writers Jean-Paul Sartre
and Simone de Beauvoir.
The photo was unknown until Mr. Korda gave a copy to an Italian visitor in
1967. When Guevara died soon after, the Italian quickly distributed the picture.
Mr. Korda never objected to mass use of his photo as a protest symbol but,
in recent years, began to fight its commercial reproduction in ways he said "dishonored"
his subject.
When he was young, Mr. Korda, who was born Alberto Diaz Gutierrez in Havana,
got his first taste of photography when he took his father's Kodak 35 and began
shooting photos of his girlfriend.
In Cuba, however, Mr. Korda's best-known photo probably is not the Che
portrait but another: "The Quixote of the Lamppost."
It features a white-garbed peasant atop a lamp post and surrounded by a sea
of Cubans at a revolutionary rally, and it is commonly used in magazines, book
covers and posters. | 