Alberto Korda

(14 de septiembre de 1928 – 25 de mayo de 2001)

Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez better known as Alberto Korda was a Cuban photographer. He became famous for the famous photograph taken of Ernesto Guevara looking at the funeral procession of the dead in the terrorist attack on the ship La Coubre, on March 5, 1960.

In the 1940s he attended commercial classes at Candler College and the Havana Business Academy, both located in Havana. Along with Luis Pierce (Luis Korda) he founded the Korda studios, where he worked between 1953 and 1968, in which they carried out all kinds of commercial work. Although his education is self-taught he learned photography at the beginning with Newton Estapé and later with Luis Pierce.

With the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, he worked for the Revolution and accompanied Fidel Castro as a photographer in different journeys that the Cuban leader made in those years. 1960 was the year that would change his life, since it was during this year that he made the famous photograph El Guerrillero Heroico, which is considered one of the ten best photographic portraits of all times and is the most reproduced of the History of photography around the world.

However, part of his greatness has been obscured because many of the photos that are attributed to him may not have been made by Korda himself but he would have bought them or stolen them from other contemporary photographers of his. He was the founder of underwater photography in Cuba. In 1968 he dedicated himself to the Institute of Oceanology of the Academy of Sciences, making the Atlas of Cuban corals. His photographic work has been exhibited in the main galleries of the European continent and in America, as well as in other parts of the world.

Some os his photos