|
|
On March 5, 1960, Che Guevara, one of the architects of the Cuban revolution, attended a memorial service for seventy-five men who died while explosive cargo was being unloaded from a ship in the Havana harbor. Photographer Alberto Korda snapped a picture of Guevara at the event, and while it went unpublished at the time, in the late Sixties an Italian publisher, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, asked Korda's permission to reproduce the image of the then-martyred revolutionary leader. Korda agreed, and within a few years his portrait of Che, wearing a beret and looking with determination to some point in the distance, became one of the most famous photos in the world. Korda didn't mind seeing the photo appear in unlikely places, from banners at protests to T-shirts, but in 2000 he filed suit against the producers of Smirnoff vodka after they used the picture in a magazine advertisement, arguing that he never intended it to be used for commercial purposes. Filmmakers Trisha Ziff and Luis Lopez trace the strange journey of Korda's portrait of Che, from revolutionary symbol to advertising logo and an iconic but little-understood image often adopted by young people who aren't sure who the man is, in the documentary Chevolution. Search keywords
|
