Assignment 4. Reflection and Evaluation

How I came to choose the iconic image of Che Guevara

My first reaction to this assignment was to look at adverts such as the one in New Scientist which I analysed in terms of its signifiers and what I thought they signified.[I] I felt this approach would not allow me to explore in the same way as a more ‘artistic’ image might. I had to look further.

I considered Ruth Orkin’s picture of An American Girl in Italy which I have seen in restaurants and hotels here and there as decorative art across Europe. It is not just the fifteen or so men in that picture who ogle the girl but conversations in hotel bars often mirror what is going on in the image. The contrast between the innocence of the young girls having an adventure in Italy and the ideological arguments about the image would offer many opportunities to fulfil the brief of this assignment, but I found it difficult to resist the temptation to have a full on rant despite what Ninalee Craig, the girl in the picture, says about it now 66 years later.[ii]

I visited an exhibition of images by Martin Parr and Tony Ray-Jones at the Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle in Co. Durham[iii]. I was very impressed by their pictures but, thinking in terms of this assignment, their pictures did not seem to me to offer much scope for talking about ‘what happened next’. I also needed to see how other people wrote about photographs. I was lucky enough to get a second hand copy of Sophie Howarth’s book, Singular Images. I read this making notes on the ‘how’ of what her contributors wrote as well as on the ‘what’. One sentence struck me in particular. She wrote, “By don’t of their reproducibility, photographs have a tendency to become unhinged from their original context and to reappear in unexpected and often incongruous places.”[iv] While this was certainly true of An American Girl in Italy I began to think about the image of Che Guevara and his image appeared in strange places.

The exhibition at Bowes Museum included a short film on how the photographs came to be made. Saying how a picture is made draws attention to the process and directs the viewer to see it in a particular way. Giving it a date, for example, invites consideration of a historical context. It was very noticeable in the case of Martin Parr that what we see is affected by how we see and by the character of the observer. It made me think about seeing things from a cultural, personal and educational background. (I see a rat and think dystopia. Nelson’s midshipmen looked at rats and saw food.)

The weakness of images in respect of meaning[v] allows all manner of speculation about what an image can mean. Barthes talks about the “obtuse” meaning which “appears to extend outside culture, knowledge, information; analytically it has something derisory about it: opening out into the infinity of language, it can come through as limited in the eyes of analytic reasoning; it belongs to the family of pun, buffoonery, useless expenditure. Indifferent to moral or aesthetic categories (the trivial, the futile, the false, the pastiche), it is on the side of carnival.”[vi] My thoughts began to focus on images that have been used and misused and began to centre on Korda’s image of Che Guevara and Ruth Orkin’s American Girl both of which would illustrate Barthe’s thought.

I was looking for an image which would allow the kind of essay plan and personal response shown by Sophie Howarth’s contributors. The image also had to be amenable to mention/discussion of translation, interpretation, connotation, sign, signifier, signified, punctum and stadium. These are easier to discuss in relation to images by Gregory Crewdson, for example, than to images by Hiroshi Sugimoto. I was conscious of the assignment tail wagging the dog of how I reacted to various images but after my last not particularly successful assignment I wanted an image that would allow me to tick all the boxes.

Putting these thoughts together I chose to write abut the iconic image of Che Guevara taken by Alberto (Korda) Diaz Gutiérrez in 1960. Following the examples of plans derived from Sophie Howarth’s contributors I made this plan:

· How I came across the image

· How this image came to be taken

· The image itself

· How the image has been received

I was very conscious of the 1000 word limit and had to be very selective. I chose not to include a comparison with this image, for example, a copy of which hangs in the Bowes Museum. I could have commented on the heavenward gaze, the contraposto and how Che’s image expresses heroic nobility while this, despite being so similar, expresses distress. I could have said more about the symbolism in the Che image, his beret and single star, his beard and unruly hair and compared it with the rich symbolism of the El Greco.

I might also have compared the portrait style with these, also by Korda which show the same angle of the shoulders and turn of the head.

Evaluation

The criteria derived from the brief are:

· Is the photograph well known?

· Has the context of the photograph been well researched?

· Are there comments on the intentions of the photographer?

· Does the essay say why the photograph was taken?

· Is there a personal opinion about what the image means to the writer?

· Does the essay show an awareness of the technical terms mentioned in the assignment brief?

· Does the essay follow thought associations and other related images?

· Does the essay show an awareness of the wider context of the image?

· Does the essay use its sources sensibly and accurately?

I have taken care to show that each of these criteria has been met within the word limit.

I enjoyed researching this image and was very pleased to be able to get a copy of Sophie Howarth’s book. My work on Assignment 3 was confused. I enjoyed being much more rigorous about this one.

---

[I] https://christopherwlog.wordpress.com/2017/02/07/part-4-reading-photographs-project-2-reading-pictures/

[ii] http://edition.cnn.com/2017/03/30/europe/tbt-ruth-orkin-american-girl-in-italy/index.html

[iii] http://www.bowesmuseum.org.uk

[iv] Howarth, S. (2005) Singular Images. London. Tate Publishing

[v] Barthes, R. trans Heath, S. (1977) Image, Music, Text. London, Fontana Press

[vi] ibid.

Assignment 4

Guerrillero Heroico

In September 1968 I became a student at a university in Paris where I would join in the struggle against some of the forces that made being a student in a newly idealistic community very difficult. General de Gaulle had arbitrarily ended all student grants leaving many students penniless and having to give up their studies. It was the best of times and the worst of times. We all learned how to deal with the effects of tear gas. Every student room, squat and drinking den had an image of Che Guevara on its walls. It was less than a year since he had been executed on the 9^th October 1967 in a village in Bolivia.

Alberto (Korda) Diaz Gutiérrez, a fashion photographer, had become the photographer of the Cuban revolution in 1959. He took this picture with a Leica M2 with a 90mm lens at a funeral on 5^th March 1960.[I] He shot two frames, this one and one in portrait format, before Che moved away. He cropped the image to this, which became the iconic image. Korda gave a copy to an Italian publisher, G. Feltrinelli. It then appeared, uncredited, in Paris Match in August 1967. Then an Irish artist, Jim Fitzpatrick, made a colour poster. When Che was executed there were demonstrations and protests and Feltrinelli sold posters to protesters. The image had not been copyrighted and began to be used anywhere and everywhere. Andy Warhol made this in 1968, a comment on the ubiquity of the image.

The image is monochrome, taken from a low angle so that the subject’s gaze appears to be slightly upwards, unfocused and out of the frame. The image is quite grainy and the sky is burnt out. The skin tones are preserved with a range of greys from the lightest on Che’s forehead to full black in his hair. His shoulders face slightly to the right of the image while his head is turned slightly to the left making an interesting contraposto composition. The light comes from the left but there is detail in the shadows on the right – Rembrandt lighting. The whole frame is tilted out of the vertical, an element corrected in the final crop. The figure on the left and the palm leaves on the right are also cropped out of the final image. The title, Guerrillero Heroico, directs the viewer’s attention to the myth which surrounds the image.

The appearance of the image cannot escape being seen through the experience of the viewer. The ubiquity of the image colours the way the original is seen in every way to the extent that for many it is impossible to identify the original as the original. “By don’t of their reproducibility, photographs have a tendency to become unhinged from their original context and to reappear in unexpected and often incongruous places.”[ii]

This image of Che has become particularly unhinged. It has been translated from its original medium to almost anything that will take a printed image, from shoes to T-shirts, posters to tatoos. “It is plausible,” said Walter Benjamin, “that no translation, however good it may be, can have any significance as regards the original”.[iii] In this case the context, and narrative power of the original has been almost entirely lost. Translation is the process of moving a thing from one place to another, reburying a saint’s body, for example. Che’s image has been reburied times beyond number and each time it has altered its significance. The Che posted on the student wall is not the same as the Che printed on a pair of shoes. One is a statement of a political belief, the other is trivial beyond belief. One affirms the importance of the image, the other denies it any importance. Its uses range from high art to banausic. The image is reburied in many unmarked graves.

There is a physical connection between the photograph and the object in front of the lens which it reproduces. This indexicality of the image is weakened when the image appears as a screen print, a miniature, a huge billboard, a flag, or a print on a bikini. The size and situation become part of the connotation just as a shout connotes something different from a whisper. The medium is the message as Marshall McCluhan proclaimed in 1964. The thing signified by the image, heroicism, respect, revolutionary fervour or simple fascination with a graphic shape, is in a state of flux. The love evident in Korda’s original is not love now as it alters where it alteration finds. Barthes’ punctum, the sense of shock as the narrative content of the image is interrupted, lies outside the image itself and is relocated to its many uses. Advertisers took advantage of this power to shock. Replacing Che’s hat badge with the Mercedes symbol, for example, was an misappropriation of the image which was rightly condemned in court but that horse had already bolted. The lack of copyright means that asking for an ‘authentic’ print makes no sense.

Roland Barthes believed that “a specific photograph … is never distinguished from its referent”[iv] Could this image of Che Guevara be an exception? Has it become a meaningless graphic? Is it an interesting monochrome shape of a face whose striking quality is so separate from the original that it can exist without the viewer having any knowledge of the significance of the subject? Matthew Diffee’s cartoon[v] would suggest that Barthes was right. What has happened though is that the “spell of the personality”[vi] has become the spell of the image.

A lot of water has gone under the bridge since the heady days of 1968 when I was an idealistic twenty year old who thought that we students could and would change the world. The revolution did not happen. Daniel Cohn-Bendit whom I heard speak in 1969 became an MEP. We all grew up and learned to live in the world as it is. This image, for all its various uses and misuses, remains as a reminder of the way we used to be.

---

[I] http://www.imaging-resource.com/news/2013/06/06/the-extraordinary-story-behind-the-iconic-image-of-che-guevara

[ii] Howarth, S. (2005) Singular Images. London, Tate Publishing

[iii] Benjamin, W. (1968) Illuminations, ed.Hannah Arendt. New York. Schocken Books

[iv] Barthes, R. Camera Lucida (1981) trans Farrar, Straus and Giroux. London. Vintage Books

[v] New Yorker. 2^nd February 2004

[vi] Benjamin, W. (1968) Illuminations, ed.Hannah Arendt. New York. Schocken Books

Assignment 4 First thoughts

Write an essay of 1000 words on an image of your choice.

I took this picture with an old 135mm lens on a Pentax K110 DSLR. I focused on the baby’s eye.

The pose is a classic mother and child. The viewer’s attention is drawn to the baby’s eye. This is the only plane of the picture which is in sharp focus. The depth of field is very narrow indeed so that he mother’s face is in very soft focus and the baby’s face is sharp enough to see the veins beneath the skin. The baby’s face is well lit while the mother’s face recedes into shadow. The eye moves from the light area at the top left into the shade at the bottom right resting on the catch light in the baby’s eye on the way.

What is the message of this photograph? The photograph distances itself from the two actual people. They are not monochrome. They move. This image catches a fraction of a second and says nothing about what happened before or after the picture was taken. The message doesn’t come from the reality, the there-was-something-in-front-of-the-lens. It comes from the way the image has been manipulated. The mother fades out of focus. She retreats, metaphorically, and the new generation takes her place. The picture takes some element of meaning from all the other mother and child images available to us but it has become stereotypical. It cannot be iconic because it is parasitic for its meaning on the whole gamut of similar images. Such a picture needs more than simple representation to acquire meaning. It needs some context to generate a frisson of emotion that will make it worth a second look. It lacks a punctum, the thing that pricks the imagination and brings you back time and again. Compare it with Dorothea Lange’s picture of Florence Owens Thompson.

Dorothea Lange’s ‘Migrant Mother’ is a photographic paradigm. It is related to the Madonna and Child meme of classical painting but it lives in the context of social photography where its influence is far greater than any painting. If there is a language of photography this image defines the photographic ‘word’ for such a scene. Its use transcends what it represents and the more it is used the more powerful its message becomes. This image changed and changes the way we look at the world. The look in the Migrant Mother’s eyes is haunted and haunting. That is the punctum of this image and the justification for its inclusion in the Farm Security Administration Collection. That said, it is still a surprise when a photograph turns out not to be ephemeral like my picture. That has become part of the legend of an unremarkable middle class family and has no significance outside that tiny context.