The Cuban photographer, Alberto Korda, who died on May 25th aged 72 while visiting Paris for an exhibition of his work, will be best remembered for his portrait of Ernesto "Che" Guevara - one of the most famous photographs of the 20th century, and one of the few that truly deserve to be called "iconic".
Born in Havana, the son of a railway worker, the young Alberto Korda had a variety of jobs, among them runner for a betting shop and door-to-door encyclopaedia salesman, before he started working as a photographer's assistant.
He took up photography with frankly macho motives. "My main aim was to meet women," he once confessed. "I wanted to be near beautiful women."
He succeeded in marrying Cuba's most beautiful model of the day, Niurka, although the marriage and two others ended in divorce.
Naturally charming and ebullient, he soon established himself as a successful fashion photographer, changing his surname from Diaz Gutierrez to that of the British film-maker, Alexander Korda, because it sounded like "Kodak" to his Cuban ear. He soon had his own studio in Havana, and an expensive playboy lifestyle.
He spent 10 years as Fidel Castro's official photographer, using his skills to humanise the revolutionary leader's image in off-duty scenes - sharing moments with Ernest Hemingway and Jean-Paul Sartre, or confronting a caged tiger at the New York Zoo.
It was while on an assignment for the newspaper Revolucion in 1960 that he took the famous photo of Che Guevara, at a protest rally after a Belgian freighter carrying arms to Cuba was blown up by counter-revolutionaries while being unloaded in Havana harbour, killing more than 100 dock-workers.
As he later recalled, it was a damp, cold day. Using a 90 mm lens, he was panning his Leica across the figures on the dais when Che's face jumped into the viewfinder. The look in Che's eyes startled him so much that he instinctively lurched backwards, and immediately pressed the button: "There appears to be a mystery in those eyes, but in reality it is just blind rage at the deaths of the day before, and the grief for their families."
Ironically, Alberto Korda's picture was relegated to an inside page of Revolucion, giving pride of place to Castro. The original remained on his studio wall until 1967, when he gave two prints as a gift to the left-wing Italian publisher, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli (the man who first published Dr Zhivago in the West, and who was blown up by a car-bomb in 1972).
A few weeks later, Che Guevara was captured and killed in Bolivia - and became an instant martyr. When Castro addressed a memorial rally in Havana's Plaza de la Revolucion, Korda's photo was used as a mural on the building facing the podium; it is still there.
Feltrinelli instantly spotted the value of the image, using one print for the cover of Guevara's diaries, and giving the other to the makers of the posters which were soon being carried throughout Europe in the protest marches of 1968.
This image of Che Guevara, noble and defiant, with tilted beret and flowing locks, rapidly spread to T-shirts and album covers, and was soon taken up by advertisers targeting youth, until it rivalled the Mona Lisa as perhaps the most replicated image ever.
But he received no royalties; Feltrinelli had used the photo without permission, and even failed to credit him.
A lifelong smoker and rum drinker, he told marvellous anecdotes of the ascetic revolutionaries. "Once, I had to take pictures of Che cutting cane with the workers," he said. "He made me work for a week cutting cane before he'd let me take a shot. He was hard that way."
From 1968 to 1978, he concentrated on underwater photography, until a Japanese exhibition in 1978 stimulated international interest in his work. From the early 1980s, he lived in modest semi-retirement, although he accompanied Castro on a recent visit to Venezuela and Mexico.
In 1999, he appeared in the pre-title sequence of Wim Wenders's documentary Buena Vista Social Club rifling through photos from the heroic early days - here is Che, for example, playing golf with Castro ("Who won?" "Fidel, because Che let him.") - which ends with an image of a demonstration outside the US embassy that he called "David and Goliath". For some reason, Wenders fails to credit him.
Speaking in Havana late last year, Alberto Korda, who leaves two sons and two daughters, said: "Life may not have granted me a great fortune in money, but it has given me the even greater fortune of becoming a figure in the history of photography."
Alberto Diaz Gutierez (Korda): born 1928; died May 2001