This image of Che, noble and defiant, with tilted beret and flowing locks, rapidly spread to T-shirts and album covers, and was soon taken up by advertisers targeting youth…
According to his Guardian obituary, photographer Alberto Korda was living “an expensive playboy lifestyle” in Havana when he found a new calling:
[H]is life was transformed by the Cuban revolution of 1959. On an assignment in the countryside soon after the guerrillas defeated the dictator Batista, he encountered such poverty that he was converted to the revolutionary cause. He began to follow the new Cuban leaders around, offering his photos to the newspaper Revolución, whose offices were close to his studios.
He spent 10 years as Fidel Castro’s official photographer, using his skills to humanise the revolutionary leader’s image in off-duty scenes – sharing moments with Ernest Hemingway and Jean-Paul Sartre, or confronting a caged tiger at the New York Zoo.
It was while on an assignment for Revolución in 1960 that Korda took the famous photo of Che…
Che Guevara was a Marxist revolutionary who fought in Cuba, the Congo, and Bolivia. One morning Korda snapped his photo at a memorial service. It was to become one of the most reproduced images in history. Korda, who gave the photograph away as a gift, would earn no money from it.
Photo credit: Graffiti in Bergen, Norway, of Che Guevara wearing his iconic ‘Guerrillero Heroico’ photograph. Sveter, January 2009 via Wikimedia Commons
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“Almost every major event that shaped our modern world had 10, 15 well-known photographers who documented it. In this massive event in China there was only Li…
In 1966, Mao Zedong began a catastrophic decade known as the Cultural Revolution. One newspaper photographer in the northeast of China, Li Zhensheng, played a crucial historical role. His Washington Post obituary explains:
The Cultural Revolution, launched by Mao to re-inject proletarian Communist fervor into his flagging national project, sent tens of millions of young zealots onto China’s streets. They staged public show trials, beatings, criticism sessions and “home raids” of bureaucrats and intellectuals. They turned on their teachers, co-workers, friends and parents. The turmoil, which Mao initiated to assert his authority and purge political rivals, is estimated to have caused 1.5 million deaths, many by suicide.
Working during that era as a state newspaper photographer, Mr. Li defied instructions to destroy negatives that contradicted official propaganda. He stored 30,000 negatives under his floorboards, waiting for the right moment to release them.
Li documented these horrors and, like many of his countrymen, was swept up by them: he spent two years in a re-education camp.
The Cultural Revolution ended only after Mao’s death in 1976. It remains a sensitive topic in China, and despite its enormity, there are relatively few publicly available photographs.
Li, after emigrating to the United States, was able to publish his photographs in 2003.
“Terrible things happened. We have a responsibility to speak about them. We must speak about them.”