• Cuba by Korda

Cuba by Korda

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by Alberto Korda

If you don’t know his name, you know his photograph—Che staring into the distance like a prophet—that has been reproduced on millions of T-shirts and posters around the world.

Korda always said he didn’t mind its use on the ubiquitous revolutionary paraphernalia but finally drew the line in the 1990s when Smirnoff used it for a vodka commercial, which he considered “disrespectful”. Alberto Korda was born Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez in Havana, 1928—the same year as Ernesto Che Guevara. Their fates were to be entwined as Korda’s portrait of the Argentine became his most famous photograph. Korda was Cuba’s best known photographer of the revolutionary period. He died in Paris in 2001. This book, originally published in France, gives an overview of Korda’s extraordinary camerawork, from his first work as a fashion photographer to “The Quixote of the Lamp Post” – a Cuban peasant sitting on a lamp post above a sea of people during a mass rally. It includes other somewhat quirky and less well-known photographs, such as Castro warily eyeing a tiger at the Bronx zoo and Che Guevara playing golf.

Ocean Press, 2006, 160 pages