Alberto Korda; Took Famous ‘Che’ Picture

Alberto Korda, the photographer whose picture of Ernesto “Che” Guevara became one of the best-known images of the last century, died Friday in Paris of a heart attack. He was 72.

Korda, a resident of Havana, was in the French capital to attend an exhibition of his work when he was stricken.

The image of Guevara wearing a military beret over flowing curls and gazing pensively took on icon status when it appeared just after the revolutionary leader was captured in Bolivia in 1967 and killed. The picture, called “Guerrillero Heroico,” was on posters and T-shirts, key rings, caps and even socks. But Korda, a true believer in communism, received little for his photograph. It was not until the late 1990s, when finally angered by the rampant commercialization of the image, that Korda successfully sued a British ad agency, which had used it in a campaign for vodka.

Korda was born Alberto Diaz Gutierrez in Havana, the son of a railway worker. A prominent fashion photographer in Cuba who admired the work of Richard Avedon, Korda was known as a man who loved fast cars and beautiful women. He had a Porsche, an MG and a fine studio across the street from the luxurious National Hotel. But he also fell in love with the Cuban revolution and surrendered all the trappings of capitalism.

“In Cuba, we had been living a shameless capitalist existence,” he told a reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune some years ago. “The revolution gave me dignity.”

From 1959 on, he abandoned commercial photography for photojournalism, spending much of his time as Fidel Castro’s personal photographer. He captured images of Castro and Che playing golf and fishing; Castro with Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev; Castro with American author Ernest Hemingway, and even an encounter Castro had with a caged tiger at the New York Zoo.

On March 4, 1960, Korda was working as a freelance photographer for the Cuban newspaper Revolution covering a memorial service for 136 people killed in the explosion of a munitions ship in Havana harbor. Castro was delivering a scathing attack against the United States, blaming Washington for the blast.

Guevara, then a minister in the Cuban government, showed up briefly, and Korda captured his image in just two frames. One of them, particularly good in Korda’s opinion, was of little interest to the editors at Revolution. Castro was the star that day, and his face would be on the front page.

Korda kept his negatives.

Seven years later, Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli heard about the two pictures on a visit to Cuba and obtained one of them.

When Guevara, then operating in Bolivia, was captured by soldiers and killed, he instantly became a martyr to the revolution. Almost instantly, Korda’s picture started showing up in Europe, which the Cuban government and Korda didn’t seem to mind.

While Korda’s place in photography was secured by the image that froze the physical beauty of the young revolutionary in time, his body of work far transcended a single photograph.

“A great photograph often overshadows the ongoing production of a photographer,” said Arthur Ollman, director of the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego. “Korda was a major photographer for decades, not only because of pictures of Fidel and the group of revolutionaries, but documenting children in school, street scenes, workers building a new society, just lots and lots of pictures.”

Tim B. Wride, associate curator and organizer of the current exhibition “Shifting Tides: Cuban Photography After the Revolution” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, said Korda brought a rare vision to photojournalism.

“You have to remember that Korda started as a commercial photographer. After the revolution, he comes to the documentary form,” Wride said. “With his history in fashion, his take on documentary photography is different than anyone else’s. There is a glamour to his photographs, amazing glamour. There is a very conscious aura that he seeks to project and most often attains in his photographs.”

Darrel Courtier, the owner of Courtier Gallery in Los Angeles, the first American to represent Korda’s work, recalled his importance to the Cuban revolution.

“One important point is that he was very concerned and deliberately so with presenting the leaders of the revolution--Che, Fidel, Fidel’s brother Raul--as human beings, people who had a personable side, a humanist side,” Courtier said. “They needed support and to show people looking hostile, it wouldn’t play well. They were trying to appeal to a larger world.” He photographed them “with the very deliberate idea of spreading the revolution to the rest of the world.”

Courtier handled Korda’s first show in America, which opened in Los Angeles in October 1998.

“It was pandemonium. It was the first time that he had been in the U.S. since 1960. He was petrified. He wasn’t sure what the response of the Americans and Cubans here would be to him. He was afraid of demonstrations and personal attacks,” Courtier recalled Friday.

“What he found was the exact opposite. People were practically walking on their knees to come see him. I had to literally push people away.”

Wride said the Che image was firmly in his head when he went to Cuba to curate the LACMA show, which contains two images by Korda, the Che picture and another called “The Quixote of the Lamppost,” of a man sitting on a lamppost high above a crowd.

“In the larger realm of photo history, [Korda] deserves a place because of the way that his images have transcended the circumstances of their making. The Che is one of those, one of the great photographs, right along with Dorothea Lange’s ‘Migrant Mother.’ It provided a whole conception of an ethic, a banner, an identity.”

Over the years, Korda made a good living by Cuban standards selling prints of his Che image. He donated the settlement money from the vodka ads to a children’s hospital in Havana.

Ollman recalled trying to buy a copy of the Guevara image from Korda for the museum’s permanent collection.

“I had a friend going to Cuba and asked him to get in touch with Korda and ask how much did Korda want for a print of it? And he said, Korda can’t use your money--this was 12 or 14 years ago--but what he really needs is a flash meter. So I went out and bought him the best flash meter I could buy, and he was thrilled with it. It’s the only picture we ever bought with photographic equipment.”

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Times Arts Editor Susan Brenneman contributed to this story.