Next week, September 14, Alberto Korda would have celebrated his 94th birthday. Korda, well known among us fellow photographers but also worldwide because of what is probably the most famous and iconic portrait in the history of photography: his image of the ‘Guerrillero Heróico’, Ernesto Che Guevara.
I first met Korda in 1991 (that meeting is worth a little note later), and ever since we met frequently. While the first time I met the legend himself was, of course, quite remarkable (I was a young shooter of 29 years), it is another encounter that comes first into my mind when I think of him.
In May 2000, together with my dear friend and writer Uschi Entenmann (we both worked for the same agency, ZeitenspiegelReportagen), we had an assignment for German magazine Merian, to do a story on the 3 living photographer legends that captured so impressively the early years of the Revolution: Alberto Korda, Raul Corrales and Roberto Salas.
We met in the house of Raul Corrales, in the Havana outskirt neighborhood of Cojimar, well known for being the place where Hemingway wrote his ‘Old Men and the Sea’.
It was a great day and we sat together many, many hours. The ‘boys’ were in a perfect mood, because we talked about photography and about the revolution and Fidel and Che Guevara and so much more. We drank café and had lunch and drank rum and café again and then more rum and the stories got better and better and the mood was just perfect (of course, it helped that Uschi, the writer, is a beautiful, tall, blue eyed German woman…😉).
We had started our meeting in the morning and it was late in the afternoon as we finally left. As we were about to get into the car and even though I had shot pictures of them the entire day while we sat together, I had another idea: I asked them to pose with what they consider to be their favorite photograph.
I have to admit that we did have too many rums so the composition of the photo is everything but perfect, but hey, there I had them, posing for me, these living legends:Roberto Salas with his photo of Fidel Castro in a hammock in the Sierra Maestra; Raul Corrales with ‘La Caballeria’ (The Cavalry) and Korda, of course, with his photo of Che Guevara!
And as I was struggling to focus well, the three of them started (jokingly) arguing about their photos, each of them saying to the others that their photo was not good and theirs was better etc, and I had to think of that great movie with Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon: Grumpy Old Men.
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(PS: Korda died less than year after our meeting, at the age of 72; Corrales in 2006 at 81. Only Roberto Salas is still alive…and kicking).