The making of the most famous photograph in the world, Guerrillero Heroico, occurred in an unplanned 30 second window — at the foot of a podium decorated in mourning, photojournalist Alberto Korda was looking through his Leica camera’s viewfinder, focusing on Cuba's former Prime Minister, Fidel Castro, when Argentine Marxist revolutionary, Che Guevera, emerged.

Before Gueveara could discreetly step back, Korda managed to take two photographs in reflex to the revolutionary's gaze, which the photographer described as “pissed off and pained.”

At the time, Korda was working on an assignment by the magazine Revolución, to cover a memorial service for those killed by an explosion of a Belgian arms cargo ship in Havana Harbor, 1960. Recolución printed photos of Castro and French philosophers Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, who were also at the ceremony, but rejected Guerrillero Heroico. But Kardo held onto the image, which decorated the wall in his studio.

Korda’s career sparked when he used his father’s camera to take photographs of his girlfriend, after which he and a friend opened a studio as fashion photographers commercializing clothes and promoting TV stars. With Castro’s revolution in 1959, the two turned into graphic reporters with a cause.

Korda accompanied Castro on trips and meetings with foreign personalities like Ernest Hemingway; playing golf and fishing with Guevara; skiing and hunting in Russia. He documented demonstrations, triumphs by Castro’s rebels, sugar cane harvests, factory settings.

Although Guevara gained popularity in Cuba for his contributions in victoriously leading Castro’s rebel army against Fulgencio Batista's dictatorship in 1959, Guerrillero Heroico became viral after he was killed in 1967, when an Italian publisher visited Kataria, who pointed to Guerrilla Heroico, hung on the wall, yellowed with seven years worth of tobacco smoke stains.

For years Korda made no money from Guerrillero Heroico but appreciated the recognition it brought to Guevara’s legacy, wearing it’s medallion around his neck.

Korda was attending an exhibition of his work in Paris when he died in 2001. He’s remembered as a top chronicler of the revolution and his death was remarked as a great loss for Cuban culture.