“Shot from below against a light background, the portrait has a raised, Godlike quality. The angle of the shot is particularly crucial, as profiles have little impact and full frontals tend to flatten the features. The direction and intensity of the subject’s gaze is also key. Che is looking past the camera, out to his vision. His line of vision has been much tinkered with by various artists, but it retains its passion even on a table mat or a screensaver.”
– Alison Jackson, photographer and film-maker.
In attendance is photographer Alberto Korda. Armed with his Leica M2 with 90 mm lens and loaded with Kodak Plus-X pan film, Korda busies himself taking pictures of Cuban dignitaries and famous French existentialist philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.
Korda's roll of film negatives. Guerrillero Heroico appears on the fourth row down, third picture over (shot horizontally).

Weeks and months later, Korda’s shot is passed out to friends and published by a few small Cuban publications. Then in 1967, Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick uses Korda’s image as a basis for creating his own stylised posters.
To create the image that pop artist Sir Peter Blake would later refer to as “one of the great icons of the 20th century”, Fitzpatrick made a paper negative on a piece of equipment called a grant enlarger. Printed in black, red, and yellow, Fitzpatrick “wanted the image to breed like rabbits” and gave away thousands of posters, often hundreds of copies at a time.

The image today remains as popular as ever. In his book ‘Che’s Afterlife: The legacy of an Image’, author Michael Casey believes it still taps into a deep well of emotion; “The randomness of the creation of the Korda image, the magic of a chance encounter, partly explains its power. This moment of beauty was as fleeting as any, yet in capturing it the photographer made it immortal. And immortality, we are told, is the stuff of art.”
Next week – the story behind the symbol for peace.

Alberto Korda
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