CHE's Iconic Image

[Guerrilla Manila]

"GUERRILLERO HEROICO"
Taken by Alberto Korda
http://www.fcif.net/foto.mes/imagen/fotochemarzo.jpg





adapted by Jim Fitzpatrick
http://irlanda.blogosfere.it/images/che_guevara_01-thumb.png

[Guerrilla Manila]

http://www.teemarto.com/images/Che150150.gif
Che: The Icon and the Ad
By Stephanie Holmes
BBC News
Oct 5 2007




It is perhaps the most reproduced, recycled and ripped off image of the 20th Century.


Che Guevara, his eyes framed by heavy brows, a single-starred beret pulled over his unruly hair, stares out of the shot with glowering intensity.


It's now 40 years since the Argentine-born rebel was shot dead, so any young radicals who cheered on his revolutionary struggles in Cuba and Bolivia are well into middle age.


But the image has been infinitely repeated - emblazoned on T-shirts and sprayed on to walls, transformed into pop art and used to wrap ice-creams and sell cigarettes - and its appeal has not faded.


"There is no other image like it. What other image has been sustained in this way?" asks Trisha Ziff, the curator of a touring exhibition on the iconography of Che.


"Che Guevara has become a brand. And the brand's logo is the image, which represents change. It has becomes the icon of the outside thinker, at whatever level - whether it is anti-war, pro-green or anti-globalisation," she says.


Its presence - everywhere from walls in the Palestinian territories to Parisian boutiques - makes it an image that is "out of control", she adds.


"It has become a corporation, an empire, at this point."


The unchecked proliferation of the picture - based on a photograph by Alberto Korda in 1960 - is partly due to a political choice by Korda and others not to demand payment for non-commercial use of the image.



Birth of an icon


Jim Fitzpatrick, who produced the ubiquitous high-contrast drawing in the late 1960s as a young graphic artist, told the BBC News website he actively wanted his art to be disseminated.


"I deliberately designed it to breed like rabbits," he says of his image, which removes the original photograph's shadows and volume to create a stark and emblematic graphic portrait.


"The way they killed him, there was to be no memorial, no place of pilgrimage, nothing. I was determined that the image should receive the broadest possible circulation," he adds.


"His image will never die, his name will never die."


For Ms Ziff, Che Guevara's murder also marks the beginning of the mythical image.


"The birth of the image happens at the death of Che in October 1967," she says.


"He was good-looking, he was young, but more than that, he died for his ideals, so he automatically becomes an icon."


The story of the original photograph, of how it left Cuba and was carried by admirers to Europe before being reinterpreted in Mr Fitzpatrick's iconic drawing, is a fascinating journey in its own right.


Alberto Korda captured his famous frame on 5 March 1960 during a mass funeral in Havana.


A day earlier, a French cargo ship loaded with ammunition had exploded in the city's harbour, killing some 80 Cubans - an act Fidel Castro blamed on the US.


Korda, Fidel Castro's official photographer, describes Che's expression in the picture, which he labelled "Guerrillero Heroico" (the heroic fighter), as "encabronadao y dolente" - angry and sad.


The picture was one of only two frames taken. The original shot includes palm fronds and a man facing Che, both subsequently cropped out.


Unpublished for a year, the picture was seen only by those who passed through Korda's studio, where it hung on a wall.



Poster boy


One man who brought the image to Europe was the leftist Italian publisher and intellectual, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who distributed posters across Italy in 1967.


After that, Korda's photograph made an appearance in several European magazines. Mr Fitzpatrick first came across it in the German weekly, Stern.


"One of the images was Korda's but it was so tiny that when I blew it up all I got was a dot matrix pattern. From this I did a quasi-psychedelic, sea-weedy version of Che," he said.


Only months later, when he finally got his hands on a larger version of the photograph, was he able to produce the image that has such universal appeal.


"I'd got an original copy of the image sent to me by a guy involved with a group of Dutch anarchists, called the Provo."


This underground movement was in turn rumoured to have been given the image by French philosopher and radical Jean-Paul Sartre, who was present at the Havana funeral when it was taken.



Capitalism and Catholicism


After Che Guevara's death, an outraged Mr Fitzpatrick furiously reprinted originals of the poster and sent it to left-wing political activist groups across Europe.


Part of his anger stemmed from vivid memories working behind a bar in Ireland as a teenager, and seeing Che walk in.


The revolutionary was briefly exploring the homeland of his Irish ancestors - the full family name was Guevara-Lynch - during a stopover on a flight to Moscow.


"I must have been around 16 or 17," Mr Fitzpatrick remembers. "It was a bright, sunny morning and light was streaming into the windows of the bar. I knew immediately who he was. He was an immensely charming man - likeable, roguish, good fun and very proud of being Irish."


Mr Fitzpatrick's version of Che arrived on the continent as many countries were in a state of flux, says Ms Ziff.


"His death was followed by demonstrations, first in Milan and then elsewhere. Very soon afterwards there was the Prague Spring and May '68 in France. Europe was in turmoil. People wanted change, disruption and rebellion and he became a symbol of that change."


As time went on, the meaning and the man represented by the image became separated in the western context, Ms Ziff explains.


It began to be used as a decoration for products from tissues to underwear. Unilever even brought out a Che version of the Magnum ice cream in Australia - flavoured with cherry and guava.


"There is a theory that an image can only exist for a certain amount of time before capitalism appropriates it. But capitalism only wants to appropriate images if they retain some sense of danger," Ms Ziff says.


But in Latin America, she points out, Che Guevara's face remains a symbol of armed revolution and indigenous struggle.


Indeed, Venezuela's Hugo Chavez often appears wearing a Che T-shirt and visitors to the offices of Bolivia's leader, Evo Morales, are reportedly greeted with a version of the iconic image fashioned from coca leaves.


Combining capitalism and commerce, religion and revolution, the icon remains unchallenged, Ms Ziff says.


"There is no other image that remotely takes us to all these different places."



http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7028598.stm

[Guerrilla Manila]

Good Book for those interested ...




http://www.hnabooks.com/images/products/9/3364-23.jpg

[Guerrilla Manila]

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2007/10/08/world/09che-600.jpg


'Che' Guevara's Iconic Image Endures
By MARTHA IRVINE
Associated Press
September 23, 2006



CHICAGO -- There's something about that man in the photo, the Cuban revolutionary with the serious eyes, scruffy beard and dark beret.

Ernesto "Che" Guevara is adored. He is loathed. Dead for nearly 40 years, he is everywhere as much a cultural icon as James Dean or Marilyn Monroe, perhaps even more so among a new generation of admirers who've helped turn a devout Marxist into a capitalist commodity.

Of all the pop culture images that surround us, it is Guevara's face immortalized in the photograph taken by Alberto "Korda" Diaz Gutierrez that often stares at us, from T-shirts and posters, refrigerator magnets and tattoos.

Part political statement and part fashion statement, the image sometimes overshadows the man, as one T-shirt wryly acknowledges. Below the photo, a caption on the shirt reads: "I have no idea who this is."

Panayiotis Lambropoulos, a young Greek immigrant who lives in Chicago, is someone who actually took the time to learn more about Guevara. He saw his first Che shirts a few years ago, and thought everyone who wore one must be a subversive rabble-rouser. Then the young investment analyst ended up buying one for himself.

Fascinated with Guevara, he began reading whatever he could about the man who helped lead the Cuban revolution and promoted armed uprisings in Africa and Latin America until he was slain in Bolivia.

"In a way," Lambropoulos said, "I've wanted to earn my T-shirt."

The photo's journey from Cuba to that shirt has been a lengthy one.

Taken in Havana on March 5, 1960, the shot captured Guevara _ eyes gazing off in the distance _ attending a memorial service for dozens who died in an attack on an arms freighter. Cuba blamed the incident on U.S.-backed counterrevolutionaries.

Korda, a fashion photographer turned photojournalist, was on assignment for the Cuban newspaper Revolucion. The photo was used publicly in Cuba from time to time, eventually becoming a symbol of national pride and the basis for a drawing of Guevara on Cuban currency. But the outside world didn't see it until several years after it was taken, when Korda gave copies to Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. Feltrinelli made posters with the photo and, after Guevara's death in 1967, used it as a cover for some of the revolutionary's published diaries.

As the photo's distribution widened, so did its fame, with several artists doing their own variations, including a famous black and red version by Ireland's Jim Fitzpatrick.

Jack Kenny, a photographer from Ann Arbor, Mich., met Korda in the late 1990s while gathering images for a book on Cuba and saw a copy of the famous original hanging on Korda's living room wall.

"He was very proud of it. But when he took it, I don't think he realized what he had," Kenny says. Korda died in 2001 and received little compensation for his photo until later in life.

Working its way from art to pop culture and back again, the image of Guevara is widely considered one of the world's most reproduced and emulated photographs.

Time and again, it surfaces - on a Madonna album cover; on a T-shirt worn by guitarist Carlos Santana at the 2005 Academy Awards; in a New Yorker cartoon by artist Matthew Diffee that depicts Guevara wearing a T-shirt with Bart Simpson's face on it.

It also has inspired gallery shows worldwide, one of the most recent _ "Che Guevara: Revolutionary & Icon" - at England's Victoria and Albert Museum.

"This portrait of Che is an ideal abstraction transformed into a symbol that both resists subtle interpretation and is infinitely malleable," curator Trisha Ziff wrote in an introduction to the British exhibit. "It has moved into the realm of caricature and parody at the same time it is used as political commentary on issues as diverse as the world debt, anti-Americanism, Latin-American identity, and the rights of gays and indigenous peoples."

Those who despise Guevara and his role in helping put Fidel Castro in power in Cuba also have created their own images and T-shirts.

There's the obvious one, a red circle and line crossing out Guevara's face. Another features the Korda photo with Guevara wearing Mickey Mouse ears.

"The ultimate irony is the millions of dollars that capitalists and bourgeois merchants have made selling the image of Che. He's probably rolling over in his grave," says Henry Louis Gomez. A 36-year-old Cuban-American who lives in Miami, he sells T-shirts from his anti-Guevara Web site, including one that says "Che is Dead Get Over It."

Since creating the site a year and a half ago, Gomez estimates that he's sold 20 or 30 shirts a tiny number, he realizes, compared with the many worn by fans of Guevara.

Courtney Guertin, a 27-year-old resident of Bristol, R.I., is one of those fans.

She first learned about Guevara when she traveled to Cuba as a college student to study the country's tourism system and opportunities, or the lack thereof, for entrepreneurs. She still collects books about Guevara, along with pins, T-shirts and other memorabilia and considers him "a man of incredible brilliance" who had "faith in the common folk."

Pablo Garcia-Pandavenes, whose father was born in Cuba, also has artwork and posters with Guevara's image at his home in Oakland, Calif. Among other things, he credits Guevara, who was trained as a physician, with helping set up Cuba's socialized health care system.

As a way of honoring the man, he's gone as far as naming his dog Che. "He's very elegant and different than a lot of breeds," he says of his Doberman pinscher. "I hope Che would find it entertaining."

Garcia-Pandavenes, who is 34, learned about Guevara from his father. As an adult, he visited a monument in Santa Clara, Cuba, that honors the native Argentinian who became a Cuban citizen after Castro took over in 1959. True of many Che fans, Garcia-Pandavenes was born after Guevara was killed.

And yet, the man and that image still resonate.

"Guevara was the ultimate revolutionary because he fought to the death, and the ultimate poster boy because he was chic," says Alvaro Vargas Llosa, a senior fellow at the Independent Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy research organization based in Washington.

Such comments trouble Vargas Llosa, who authored the book "The Che Guevara Myth and the Future of Liberty." He questions whether Guevara's admirers really understand who he was.

Among other things, his detractors accuse Guevara of overseeing the executions of scores of people who opposed the Castro regime.

"As a Latin American, it puzzles me, fascinates me and makes me angry, all at the same time, that young Americans and Europeans should continue to idolize him, thereby reinforcing the notion that revolutionary socialism is the way to combat underdevelopment," says Vargas Llosa, a native of Peru.

"Perhaps my consolation is in the fact that people do not tend to associate Guevara with the Castro revolution but with an abstract idea of revolution that does not and will never exist."

Others wonder if Guevara's cultural longevity has more to do with a modern-day wariness of politicians and a quest to find someone to believe in - or if it's just a lemming-like wish to be trendy, sending a vague message of coolness without much depth.

"While former generations expressed themselves with protest posters, our own generation seems to believe that a T-shirt says it all, or enough and when they're bored, it's on to the next one," says Rachel Weingarten, a Gen Xer who tracks pop culture trends at her New York marketing firm. "In other words, I care enough to wear a T-shirt, but not quite enough to actually rouse myself to make changes in my community or the world."

Back in Chicago, Lambropoulos says he's trying to maintain a balanced view.

"I realize the dark side. I've read about it. People talk about it," he says. But he's still keeping his Che T-shirt, even if he's not "a 100 percent fan."

"He chose to fight on. I don't think you really see that today," he says of Guevara. "I know at his age, I wasn't changing the world."

Already, he's had Argentinians, proud of their native son, stop him on the street when they see his shirt. "Do you know who that is?" they ask, excitedly.

He's also prepared for the inevitable angry response.

"If somebody came up to me and said, 'My uncle was executed,' I would ask questions," he says. "I would welcome a conversation.

"Teach me."


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/23/AR2006092300346_pf.html

[F9]

korda's picture.just fantastic,the look of che his eyes...This picture retains him alive!

Fuserg9:star:

[Guerrilla Manila]

http://vivirlatino.com/i/2007/10/15_mar2.jpghttp://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2005-09/01/xin_57090201100668722821.jpg

A Revolutionary Icon, and Now, a Bikini
By MARC LACEY
The New York Times
October 9, 2007



SANTA CLARA, Cuba, Oct. 8 — Aleida Guevara March, the 46-year-old daughter of Che Guevara, says she can bear the Che T-shirts, the Che keychains, the Che postcards and Che paintings sold all over Cuba, not to mention the world.

At least some of the purchasers truly cherish Che, she says. On Monday she was surrounded by thousands of Che fans wearing his image here in Santa Clara, where her father’s remains are kept, and where she sat in the front row of a ceremony to observe the 40th anniversary of his death.

Raúl Castro, the acting president, attended. A message was read from his older brother Fidel, who ceded power in August 2006 after emergency surgery, likening his former comrade-in-arms to “a flower that was plucked from his stem prematurely.”

But amid all the ceremony, what really gets to Ms. Guevara is the use of the man she calls Papi in ways that she says are completely removed from his revolutionary ideals, like when a designer recently put Che on a bikini.

In fact, 40 years after his death, Che — born Ernesto Guevara de la Serna — is as much a marketing tool as an international revolutionary icon. Which raises the question of what exactly does the sheer proliferation of his image — the distant gaze, the scraggly beard and the beret adorned with a star — mean in a decidedly capitalist world?

Even in Cuba, one of the world’s last Communist bastions, Che is used both to make a buck and to make a point. “He sells,” acknowledged a Cuban shop clerk, who had Che after Che staring down from a wall full of T-shirts.

But at least here he is also used to inspire the next generation of Cubans. Schoolchildren invoke his name every morning, declaring with a salute, “We want to be like Che.”His quotations are recited almost as often as those of Fidel Castro.

“There’s no doubt that when Fidel dies someday, his image will be just like Che’s,” said Enrique Oltuski, the vice minister of fishing and a contemporary of both men. But Che’s mythic status as a homegrown revolutionary does not extend everywhere, even if his image does. When Target stores in the United States put his image on a CD carrying case last year, critics who consider him a murderer and symbol of totalitarianism pressed the retailer to pull the item.

“What next? Hitler backpacks? Pol Pot cookware? Pinochet pantyhose?” Investor’s Business Daily said in an editorial, calling the use of the image an example of “tyrant-chic.”

That famous image of Che, by a Cuban photographer, Alberto Korda Díaz, was taken at a March 5, 1960, funeral rally for dozens of Cubans killed in a boat explosion for which Cuba blamed the United States. The picture became famous after appearing in Paris Match magazine in 1967, just weeks before Che was killed by soldiers in Bolivia, apparently aided by the C.I.A.

Mr. Korda, who died in 2001 at age 72, never received royalties but did sue a British advertising agency over the use of the photo for a campaign promoting vodka. He won $50,000, which he donated toward buying medicine for children.

Ms. Guevara and her family, too, have tried to stop the marketing of Che’s image in ways that they find abhorrent. She says they have reached out to lawyers in New York, whom she would not identify, to pursue companies the family thinks are misusing the image, not to sue them for damages, but to ask them to stop.

“We’re not after money,” she said. “We just don’t want him misused. He can be a universal person, but respect the image.”

Some of Che’s star power has rubbed off on his four surviving children, one of whom is named Ernesto Guevara and drove to the memorial on a motorcycle, just like Dad. Cubans hug the Guevaras in the street, and tourists are giddy when they learn who they are.

“I have goose bumps,” said Alfredo Moreno, 32, a Mexican who posed for a picture with Ms. Guevara, clearly overcome with emotion. “I can’t describe to you what this moment means to me.”

As Mr. Moreno went on and on, Ms. Guevara told him to stop his fawning words.

“I’m a child of Che,” she explained, “but I’m not Che.”

Ms. Guevara is in fact a pediatrician and mother of two who favors pantsuits over military fatigues. She resembles a Cuban soccer mom more than a revolutionary.

Her sister is a veterinarian. One brother manages a center devoted to Che in Havana. Then there is Ernesto, a Harley-Davidson aficionado. All are called on by the Cuban government from time to time to help continue their father’s legacy.

It is not hard to detect a bit of exhaustion in all this, particularly now, when Cuba and much of Latin America are holding major events to honor both his death and, next June, what would have been his 80th birthday.

“I can’t be everywhere,” Ms. Guevara said. “I can’t multiply myself.”

Ms. Guevara travels the world speaking at conferences dealing with Che. At one in Italy, she learned after signing T-shirts for some young people that they were fascists. “They knew nothing about him,” she said with a sigh.

Once, she said, she bumped into John F. Kennedy Jr. in Europe and discussed with him the challenges of being the offspring of a famous man.

She called him “a beautiful person,” and said she was able to separate him from his father, who ordered the Bay of Pigs invasion to try to topple the government that Che had helped put in place in Cuba.

But bring up United States foreign policy, and the resemblance to her father really emerges. The fiery speech flows when she discusses the war in Iraq. She calls the economic embargo of Cuba that has stretched on for 50 years “so brutal, so stupid, so irrational.”

And don’t even get her started about the Bush administration.


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/world/americas/09che.html?_r=3&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

[Guerrilla Manila]

NEW YORK TIMES - INTERACTIVE GALLERY :che:


http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2007/10/08/world/americas/20071008_CHE_AUDIO_GRAPHIC.html#


"A REVOLUTIONARY AFTERLIFE"

[Guerrilla Manila]

:star3:


MSNBC Slideshow: In Cuba, Che Still Sells Revolution


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21151097/displaymode/1107/framenumber/1/s/2/



:cubaflag:

[BIG BROTHER]

look at that powerfull sight of him.

[LiberaCHE]

"Because the photo of Che Guevara was, before the eyes of millions of people, the image of the supreme dignity of the human being. Because Che Guevara is only the other name of what is more just and dignified in the human spirit. He represents what sometimes is asleep in us. It represents what we have to wake up to know and to learn to know even ourselves, to add the humble step of each one of us to the common road of all of us."


~ José Saramago

[politics student]

I just started reading about his life one fact I enjoyed is that his birth certificate and death certificates were faked.

:thumbup1:

[Jolly Red Giant]

Jim Fitzpatrick, who produced the ubiquitous high-contrast drawing in the late 1960s as a young graphic artist, told the BBC News website he actively wanted his art to be disseminated.

Jim Fitzpatrick (a few years older than me) lived around the corner from my home growing up. Che visited Jim's uncle's pub in the same town in 1962 while he was waiting for refuelling after he landed at Shannon Airport while on a flight from Moscow to Havana.

[h9socialist]

Che's image will live forever, because Che's ideas will live forever. I am all for the proliferation of his image as a revolutionary and visionary socialist! The trick is to keep the capitalists from turning him into a marketing campaign. I think that this is just one more argument in favor of revolution.

[un_person]

I own one Che shirt, all the books that he wrote, and John Lee Anderson's biography on him. This is all I own because I hate seeing a heroic man like Che being used to sell capitalist shit. I believe it is a great disservice to the man himself. So before I ever think of buying anything with Che on it I always ask: WWCD? Yeah, What Would Che Do?

[CHE with an AK]

Gael García Bernal (played Che in The Motorcycle Diaries): "How would Ernesto feel about having his face all over the world on a T-shirt?"

Alberto Granado (travel mate of Che who accompanied him): "Well, knowing him, I think he wouldn't mind, especially if it was a girl."