Che Guevara, The Photographer
17 January – 30 March 2003
www.mkg-hamburg.de
What if Ernesto Guevara Lynch de la Serna, a medical doctor and photographer from Argentina, had worked for Magnum in the 1950s instead of an Argentinean photo agency? Would he still have become known to the world as ‘Che’ or would he have become another Sebastião Salgado?
The irony is delicious. Alberto Korda’s iconic image of Che looking messianic in a black beret is probably the most reproduced photograph in the world and has led to innumerable revolutionary and romantic fantasies over the past 40 years. This exhibition – curated by Josep Vicent Monzó of the Centro de Estudias de Che Guevara, Havana, and Claudia Gabriele Philipp of the MKG, Hamburg – shows Che on the other side of the camera and seeks to present him away from ‘the cult surrounding his person’.
I was a photographer before I was a
Comandante,’ he once declared, and when asked the question after the triumph
of the Cuban Revolution, ‘Are you a revolutionary or a photographer?’ he
answered, not surprisingly, ‘I am a revolutionary photographer’. At another
time, reminiscing about his medical career, he spoke of treating lepers in
Africa à la Dr. Albert Schweitzer, whose work he doubtless knew through W.
Eugene Smith’s famous photo essay for Life magazine. Other influences
included Aleksander Rodchenko’s work USSR under Construction (1936) and,
most likely, Walker Evans’s Havana 1933. With this in mind, it’s interesting
to see how his pictures hold up to those of his idols.
His photojournalism, exemplified by his coverage of the 1955 Pan American
Games in Mexico and a series documenting the ascent of the Mexican volcano
Popocatépetl, of the same year, is very straightforward. It owes a lot to
the Bauhaus, the New Seeing imagery of the 1920s and 1930s, mountaineering
imagery with high-angle photos not unlike those of Leni Riefenstahl’s
mountain epics, and sports reportage – in one case he shows an Argentine
athlete on the winner’s platform towering over two American runners-up.
Elsewhere during the 1950s, he took photographs throughout South and Central America, documenting indigenous villages and colonial-era ruins. They are well executed and sensitive, but nothing spectacular. After becoming Minister for Industry and later ‘Ambassador of the Cuban Revolution’, he continued to take photographs. His pictures of schools, factories and industrial landscapes are quite modernist and could be compared to Charles Sheeler’s or Rodchenko’s. Similarly, he documented the sites of the battlegrounds and camps in the Sierra Maestra where he, Fidel and the other guerrilleros fought. His pictures as Ambassador, however, whether taken in Asia or elsewhere, are little more than simple travel photographs showing street life, ruins and other touristic curiosities. They are sometimes interesting and show a humanist engagement with his surroundings, but it isn’t Magnum material.
It is his self-portrait series made over 20 years that generates the most interest and, dare one say, pathos. From the earliest images at the beginning of the 1950s, through the time of the triumph of the Revolution, to his career as Ambassador and then would-be liberator of the Third World, his images take on a personal life of their own. Whether he is portrayed with beret and cigar, in a helicopter on an inspection tour over Cuba, in the clutter of a hotel room in Tanzania, or in the passport pictures taken while being hunted by the CIA, these self-portraits are imbued with a specific intelligence, sensibility and psychological awareness that his other work seems to lack. They make up for the progressive-objective studies of factories and villagers and other committed photography. This show reveals, through Che’s personal energy, the subjective side of the ‘Permanent Revolution’ for which he lived and died.
Bill Kouwenhoven