Che’s best known photo was taken by chance by Alberto Díaz Korda’s lens during a cold afternoon of March 1960 while he worked in the funerals of the victims of the sabotage against the French ship “La Couvre” where Fidel Castro was delivering a speech.
Years later, the already dead artist of the lens would say: “Che was in a second stage. He gets closer to look at the crowd of people. He is in my objective, I shot one and then another negative, but he goes away in that precise moment. Everything happened in half a minute.” Things were so rapid that he only had time for pressing the shutter twice. However, one of the images with a certain expression would last forever. It would become a flag of struggle and combat for different generations of progressive men and women in the whole planet.
At the age of 16, Korda began working as a photographer and he did it first as a publicist photographer until he began to work for the revolution journal on January 1st, 1959 .
At the age of 72, he passed away in Paris where he was on a visit. A heart attack put an end to the artist’s life whose immortality had been sealed that cold afternoon of March 1960 when he got the image of a face whose eyes conveyed that glance able to make a chimera come true.