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The last Sacred Image of the Latin American Revolution
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Mestman, Mariano Ernesto |
| Copyright Year | 2010 |
| Abstract | Some of the most widely circulated political images of recent years are those of Ernesto Che Guevara. And much has been said about the constantly renovated significance that those images acquired over the time and spaces within which they were disseminated. With regard to the iconic photographs, comment has focused on the enormous gulf between the political and cultural topography of the epoch in which they were captured and that of the subsequent periods in which they were (and are) deployed or received. Similarly, criticism has concentrated on the ideological emptying of the Guevara epic as a result of contemporary consumption of the posters, T-shirts, cups, stamps and postcards that have proliferated as part of the culture industry’s uses and abuses of Che Guevara’s image. Although a multitude of these images spread to many parts of the world, there were two which, for fundamentally different if not openly opposed reasons and political motives, were particularly widely distributed in the years immediately after Che’s death. One is Alberto (Dı́az Gutiérrez) Korda’s famous photograph of Guevara wearing a beret with a five-pointed star and staring fixedly into the distance; the other, the photograph of Guevara’s corpse lying in a stretcher atop a large concrete sink in the laundry room at Vallegrande Hospital, to where it was taken after his execution in La Higuera. There are many versions of the latter photograph, but the most well-known is Bolivian press photographer Freddy Alborta’s shot, in which Guevara’s body is surrounded by Bolivian soldiers and other journalists (figure 1). Whereas the first was embraced by an entire generation as a symbol of the rebellious spirit of Revolution, appeared on the flags and banners of anti-establishment movements and was incorporated within the collective visual memory of political struggle from the 1960s onwards, the second (in its various versions), although not so durable, was equally as significant in that it was instantly transmitted as a radiophoto and hit the front pages of the world’s press immediately after Che’s demise; indeed, its intention was to prove that Guevara had been captured and killed. |
| Starting Page | 23 |
| Ending Page | 44 |
| Page Count | 22 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| DOI | 10.1080/13569321003589922 |
| Volume Number | 19 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://revistas.ufrj.br/index.php/eco_pos/article/download/1466/1299 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.1080/13569321003589922 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
