Ernesto Che Guevara
A painter with drawing and color "easily captures reality or expresses someone's character", said the great Argentinian photographer jokingly and even mockingly. Freddy Alborta in the mid-70s of the last century, looking at a photo of a colleague Alberto Corda Diaz. The great Latin American revolutionary was "captured" and immortalized in that photo Ernesto Che Guevara. In the legendary photo, Che Guevara was "caught" thoughtfully and anxiously observing (most likely) the world of the future and the people in it.
Years later looking at Korda's photograph of Che, Ž.P. Sartre called the person pictured "the most complete human being of our era". I guess the great thinker wanted to express that in Che's image in the photo you can gather and see the stormy conflict of ideologies in the 20th century.
It is true that great painters, sculptors and even modern performers, with the power of their passion, talent, think, feel, "see" and express the world from their own, sensory or other orbit. They are active creators who, in their artistic momentum, compress time and space, leaving their original aesthetic imprint of a record of seeing reality. Normally, no matter what the object of their observation is.
Great artists by seeing (individual) reality raise people to a higher and desirable level of "salvation", as somewhere the salvation of man was seen only in beauty Fyodor Mihailovich.
Unlike these artists, it is the other way around with great photographers. Photographers are passive creators. The field of their activity is much narrower, shorter and almost not at all inventive. And it is precisely in such a narrowed and shortened photo workspace that one knows how to create ("capture") a large and important picture of reality and the man in it.
Therefore, the photo object - as the reality of the moment - should be able to see and "capture". But the moment of happiness is also important. It is not rare that out of thousands of "clicks" with the camera, not a single significant photo remains.
But it is rare to "capture" history and its reality in a single photo. Such is Che's iconic image in Albert Korda's photograph. (Che accidentally fell into the photo frame, later the humble A. Korda explained and defended himself.)
The cult and globally famous photograph of Ernesto Che Guevara, shows a strikingly handsome, macho disheveled, unshaven revolutionary in a torn shirt, white and aristocratic complexion with a beret on his head and a red pentacle clumsily sewn on it. The photograph carries a piercing thought and a terrifying courage. The black eyes in the photo are icy, calm and self-confident.
It is fortunate that the photo is not in color. Two colors, black and white, give the photo more dynamics and contrast than if the photo was in color. Color would trivialize the photo.
An aristocrat by origin and a doctor by profession, Che pitifully - and perhaps curiously - observes the future people in the imaginary orbit of the "red" galaxy. But also outside the "red", communist galaxy.
Perhaps, on the other hand, we would not be wrong if we call Ernest Che Guevara's eyes "lighthouses" that warn of the possible fate of modern man and the coming age. Regardless of whether that era came from the ideological and political East (USSR) or the West (USA). Therefore, it is not surprising that the photograph is equally inherited and used for propaganda by everyone in the world, considering that the photograph is exactly theirs.
Either one or the other is true, in Che's character and his outlook one can concentrate and see the reality of an epoch and the bleakness of the times in the future.
And yet, Che's peaceful outlook is ideologically populist. He is on a par with the common man who is everywhere squeezed, disenfranchised, depersonalized and impoverished by the modern age and attacked by "fishermen of human souls" (Đ. Sušnjić) from all sides. Not only with Cuban-Bolivian or Latin American capitalist "fishermen" but "fishermen" of the entire Planet.
On the other hand, ie. on the part of the "receptor" of Che's photograph, his view is a view of hope in the common man and in the "red" ideology.
The shading of the character in the photo gives a deep and mythical content to the photo. Therefore, it is not surprising that photography is the eternal brand, hope and flag of oppressed and poor people around the planet. Photographs of Che are everywhere from teacups to subway murals. Not to mention t-shirts, tattoos, pendants and numerous miserable commercialization of photography.
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There are countless photos of various revolutionaries. But Che's photography is unique. She lives above and beyond history and beyond time. Che's personal, revolutionary life is far below the legend of the photograph. And legends are remembered and last, regardless of how they affect or change reality.
They would conclude from the photos that ideologies are social "dwarves". But also a powerful revolutionary passion and revolutionary force that can be seen, transmitted, survived and built a new, future hope and reality even through photography.
Ljubo Čupić
One of "our" legendary photos - no less dramatic than Che's - is a photo from the shooting Cedomir-Ljuba Čupića. His Leonardo smile was "caught" a few moments before his death in April 1942 in Nikšić. The defiant "red" bundžija, a Montenegrin rebel, with a haughty and aristocratic demeanor and look, amazed the officer of the occupying army Karl Ravnič. He photographed the shooting of Ljubo Čupić in order to scare the rebellious Nikšić and Montenegrin people.
Unlike Che, who looked at the world from the top of the revolution, Ljubo Čupić looked at the revolution from below. Let me remind you, Ljubo Čupić was the commissar of a partisan company of which there are thousands. Ljubo was captured on Koblena Glavica in 1942. with a young partisan Jokom Baletic. (She is no less a hero than Ljub, but she was not "lucky" to be immortalized by a photographer.)
The condemnation of the pro-fascists (Nikšić Chetniks) was quick, wartime - death to the prisoners. Joka Baletić was hanged under the hill of Trebjesa and Ljubo Čupić on the edge of the Nikšić cemetery.
Their demeanors on the battlefields were heroic and almost identical. As if she stepped out of some kind of example of purity and heroism Marko Miljanov, Joka put the noose around her neck and set off into eternity. He laughed lovingly in the face of the executioners. He shouted to the Party, Tito, Stalin, to the USSR.
Ljub's smile was "caught" by the camera.
For a heroic society such as Montenegrin, a smile was not known in our painting. Almost all Montenegrin faces in the pictures are tense, strict and serious. The force and spasm of austerity is everywhere. There is no smile. The eyes and tight lips are the most expressive.
It is easy to conclude that the daily challenge of death and daily walking on the edge of a knife in Montenegro cannot cause a smile. Ljub's character and photo was an exception. Magnificent, of course.
Heroes like Ljubo have a kind of "inner" laugh. Just as in The Iliad or Mountain wreath the heroes "laugh out loud" at their fate, leaving fear and silence behind...
Ljub's smile is challenging, haughty, towering, fearless. It is a smile of message and instruction, of defiance and love of freedom. It is as if even today this photograph laughs at every human evil and attacks.
It is interesting that Ljubo Čupić was proposed for National Hero by Tito. At a large exhibition from the NOB in Belgrade at Kalemegdan in 1952, Tito's political eye could not help but notice Ljub Čupić's photograph. Stunned by Ljub's smile, he asked the escort about this fighter. No one could answer him, who is the anonymous fighter? That was reason enough for Tito that "from tomorrow" the fighter must be declared a National Hero.
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Maybe the great revolutionaries Če and Ljubo really saw something behind them or above them, and Korde and Ravnič were the favorites of the moment and happiness and recorded the happiness with their camera. Who will know?
History is also made by heroes. Perhaps in human civilization there are only rare "clairvoyants". And without such there is no movement. Everything else is an illusion, "dust and ashes" as it is still in the biblical i I care a man marked by the times.
The photographs of the two cult revolutionaries of the 20th century, Che Guevara and Ljub Čupić, express the higher ideological essence of individual and collective defiance and rapture.
These photographs "paint" a deeper reflection of the heart of civilization (Che Guevara) and a particular society and its reality (Ljubo Čupić).
Bonus video:
