René Burri – Che Guevara

Few photographs are etched into the collective memory like the portrait of the Argentine-Cuban revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara taken by René Burri. In 1963, shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis nearly plunged the world into a nuclear war, Burri met the young minister of industry in Havana. For its first publication in the magazine Look, the photograph was severely cropped. The hippie and commune scene of the late 1960s would subsequently make the image an icon of youth culture.