Product Overview
If you dont know his name, you know his photographChe staring into the distance like a prophetthat has been reproduced on millions of T-shirts and posters around the world.
Korda always said he didnt 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 Daz Gutirrez in Havana, 1928the same year as Ernesto Che Guevara. Their fates were to be entwined as Kordas portrait of the Argentine became his most famous photograph. Korda was Cubas best known photographer of the revolutionary period. He died in Paris in 2001.
This book, originally published in France, gives an overview of Kordas 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.
The proof strip of the roll of film from which the famous shot of Che was taken is also reproduced, including Kordas photos of Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir who were visiting Cuba which were published at the time, not the photo of Che! Korda liked the photo and stuck it on his wall until an Italian journalist spotted it and took it home.
