CORNELL CAPA

For a quarter of a century, David Seymour, more familiarly known as“Chim”, has been a valued part of my personal and professional life.  Hewas a man who translated his deep human concerns into lasting images that have become an important photographic record of the period from the 1930s to his sudden death in 1956.
Chim was a deeply cultured, well-read, highly intelligent, and very private person.  The emotions that were bottled up in him poured out in his images of the Spanish Civil War; war-ravaged children; the living rituals of religion; and the establishment of Israel.  At that time, in 1948, he wrote to his sister Eileen Shneiderman:  “It was like coming home again.  It was like picking up the threads of my life, for which I had been searching in vain on the heaps of rubble and ash in the ruins of Warsaw.”
Together with his friends and colleagues, the late Werner Bischoff and Robert Capa, he evolved the founding principle that eventually led to the creation of the International Center of Photography.
Now, with the publication of this portfolio we celebrate the permanence of his vision and its contribution to our collective visual heritage.

Cornell Capa
Executive Director
International Center of Photography