© Alberto Korda)

He speaks with a pas­sion­ate cigar-burnt voice, his col­or­ful shirt may be bright, but it does not out­shine the light of his pres­ence. One of his work is the most rec­og­niz­able image in the entire face of this earth, even those who were born long after his object wears the image on their skin as a tat­too and bumper stick­ers. His name is Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez, bet­ter known as Alberto Korda, the man who cap­tured the iconic image of the son of the Cuban rev­o­lu­tion, Ernesto Ché Guevara.

Like every­one else, he was just shoot­ing for the sake of shoot­ing, he never knew that one of his can­did shot in 1967 of Ché, who was lis­ten­ing to Fidel’s speech at the time he cap­tured the image, would turn out to be the image of courage, hope, of an ideal that sym­bol­izes the spirit of freedom.

It was cap­tured like most iconic images of our time: With a com­bi­na­tion of luck, keen obser­va­tion & sharp eye; how it came to fame, how­ever, is another story:

Then in early 1967, a stranger came knock­ing. The stranger hap­pened to be Italian pub­lisher Gianfranco Feltrinelli who was look­ing for a por­trait of Che, so Korda gave him two copies of the print as gift. In October of that same year, Che was exe­cuted by the Bolivian army. Feltrinelli printed a thou­sand posters of Che and began sell­ing them – this is the photo which became iconic around the world, and is present even today on many shirts, posters and books. Feltrinelli became very rich off of this photo, how­ever Korda never received any roy­al­ties or money for tak­ing what is con­sid­ered the worlds most pub­lished pho­to­graph. People often ask Korda how he was able to take that pho­to­graph, and he admits “This pho­to­graph is not the prod­uct of knowl­edge or tech­nique. It was really coin­ci­dence, pure luck.” For all the amaz­ing work that he did, he was a very mod­est and hum­ble man who enjoyed a lot of the sim­pler things in life.

Aside from being a doc­u­men­tar­ian, he was also a pho­tog­ra­pher on his own terms. As you can see from the col­lec­tion above, Fidel & Ché were not his only object of love, but also women and fashion:

Korda also loved fash­ion – mainly because of the beau­ti­ful mod­els, how­ever fash­ion pho­tog­ra­phy was not a cus­tom at that time in Cuba, so Korda began his pho­tog­ra­phy career tak­ing pho­tos for adver­tise­ments. However his true pas­sion for women showed through as he chased after the young up and com­ing mod­els. He man­aged to find a reg­u­lar place for his fash­ion pho­tog­ra­phy in Havana Weekly, mak­ing him Cubas first fash­ion pho­tog­ra­pher. In 1959 he was awarded the “palma de plata” for his pho­tog­ra­phy. He fell in love with one of the top mod­els in Cuba – Natalia Mendez – and soon made her his wife.

True to his ‘Fidelism’ beliefs, he donated his entire col­lec­tion of 12,000 neg­a­tives to the Historical Study of The Revolution¹, he said, he wants these pho­tographs to out­live him.

We never gave him enough credit for his life­time ded­i­ca­tion, nor we gave enough thoughts to that idea of free­dom that he and his Cuban friends have fought for. Not long after the (uncred­ited) appear­ance in Buena Vista Social Club, he left us with this can­did wis­dom.

Alberto’s vision:

• Alberto Korda by Bill Lasarow
• Photographs by Korda
• In pic­tures: Korda pho­tos of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara
• Women & Fashion Gallery

— R.I.P. Alberto Korta (14/09/1928 — 25/05/2001).