David Seymour “Chim”

David Szymin was born in Warsaw on 20 November 1911, the son of Benjamin Szymin, a leading Polish publisher of books on Jewish subjects. In 1929 he started studying graphic arts and photography at the Akademie der Graphischen und Buch Künste in Leipzig, Germany, where he specialised in the new techniques of printing pictures in colour. In 1931 he moved to Paris to learn more about physics and chemistry at the Sorbonne. The political problems that developed in Poland during those years had a considerable effect on his father’s business, and he was advised to take up photography by David Rappaport, founder of the Rap agency, who in 1932 provided him with his first 35 mm camera. Thus he became David Seymour, the photographer who signed his work as Chim, a French phonetic abbreviation of his Polish surname. He began to contribute to magazines such as Vu, Regards, Ce Soir and La Vie Ouvrière, travelling throughout Europe so that his eye could capture the most significant situations in a society experiencing events that have left their mark on much of the history of the twentieth century. In 1935 he photographed Romain Rolland and André Malraux, among others, and took part in the conference on the defence of culture in Paris. His interest in social movements led him to travel to Spain in 1936 in order to cover the development of the Civil War, and in his photographs of the situation of the civilian population he achieved one of his finest reportages. He continued travelling, in North Africa and Czechoslovakia, and in 1939 emigrated to the United States and began a series of reportages on Spanish refugees in Mexico after the end of the Civil War. In 1940 he set up a studio in New York, and he obtained American nationality in 1942. He joined the Navy as a volunteer, serving as an official photographer until he was demobilised as a lieutenant in 1945. He resumed his travels in Europe, Israel and Egypt, photographing scenes in countries at war, but also capturing their customs and ceremonies with great mastery. Illustrious figures were treated with the same intensity as children or other anonymous characters, who gradually filled the pages of this great committed photographer’s special travel album. In 1947 he was one of the co-founders, with Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson and George Rodger, of the cooperative agency Magnum Photos, intended to watch over the photographers’ interests and monitor the publication of their work, not only in the technical or professional area but also in the communication media closest to their political ideas. In 1948, UNESCO commissioned him to make a book about the situation of children in Europe after the war. A series about lost, crippled or sick children, carried out with such commitment that, although not married, he gave shelter to a number of children, whom he adopted and brought up, eventually finding new homes for them through his friends. From 1954 to 1956 he was president of Magnum-Photos, combining this responsibility with his work as a photographer until his death, on 10 November 1956, as the result of being struck by a bullet while preparing a reportage on the Suez Canal, a few days after an armistice in the war there was achieved. The exhibition, organised in conjunction with Magnum-Photos, includes a selection of 148 photographs, reproduced in the catalogue, together with texts by Ramón Esparza, Henri Cartier-Bresson, John G. Morris and Josep Vicent Monzó and a special introduction written by Eileen Shneiderman and Ben Shneiderman, the photographer’s sister and nephew.