A few days ago I was attending an event for Julian Assange at a photo gallery and got to talking with an Argentinean about this image. I mentioned to him that two years ago two Indian and three Argentinean college students in my Vilnius Lithuanian class had no idea who the picture on one of the Indian students‘ book bag was of, to the wry amusement of the Lithuanian instructor and myself. Several days after our discussion in class I noticed the enthusiastic BJP adherent no longer carried that book bag; I imagined he had discovered who this was.
Until this morning I’d never known the photo’s provenance, and had always assumed it was taken sometime in the early 1960s. It actually dates to before my birth, and I am musing over this new-found knowledge. The Argentinean exile here in Berlin and I had agreed the popular image is used on t-shirts, book bags, posters, etc. interchangeably with images of Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix, all mysterious rebellious virile young men long dead, presumably killed by the forces of the establishment which equally oppress the t‑shirted pot-smoking IBud-wearing rebels of today’s coffee shops. Che’s always been a symbol of political revolution more than cultural taste for me. Learning the photo’s age has me thinking about the usage we make of icons.
