Teaching Che: a picture is worth a thousand words (or t-shirts)

The familiarity of iconic photographs make them helpful tools for building young people’s visual literacy, particularly those with limited art experience. In a seminar designed to introduce first-year college students to the rigours of academic work, Alberto Korda’s photograph of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara is the icon of choice. History has given Guevara many guises; throughout the course students consider how Guevara and others constructed his image, and how the replication of that image can be deconstructed in terms of various art media. Wedding word and image, and using museum-education techniques combined with traditional art-historical modes of inquiry, students explore the meaning of the man behind the t-shirt.