David
Seymour (1911-1956)

BOOKS

David ‘Chim’ Seymour: Searching for the Light. 1911–1956

By Carole Naggar

De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2022

 

About this book: 

“He used his camera like a doctor would use a stethoscope in order to diagnose the state of the heart. His own was vulnerable.”, Cartier-Bresson wrote about David Seymour, who liked to be called Chim.

Chim is best known as one of the cofounders of photojournalism’s famous cooperative Magnum Photos. Weaving Chim’s life and work, this book discovers this empathetic photographer who has been called “The First Human Rights Photographer”.

In 1947, Chim was one of the four cofounders of the Magnum Photos cooperative with Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson and George Rodger. He also wrote Magnum’s 1955 bylaws, which are still in effect today. But he is the only one of those famous photographers who does not have a full biography to his name. This book examines his life and work from Poland to France to the Spanish Civil War, his work for British intelligence during World War II, his reportage on Europe’s children after the war, his reportages on Italian actors, illiteracy and religious festivals in Southern Italy, his coverage of Israel’s beginnings before his 1956 death during the Suez war. His complex itinerary is emblematic of the displacements and passages of the XXth century.

Publisher page: https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110706345/html 

Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Lives-Chim-Biography-David-Seymour/dp/3110704161/

 

Book Review in The Volunteer (Founded by the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade)
Chim Seymour’s Humanist Gaze (August 18, 2022), By Sebastiaan Faber

Excerpt: “No one knows more about David Seymour than historian and curator Carole Naggar, who has studied his life and work for decades. Her long-awaited biography, handsomely edited by De Gruyter, provides a detailed, near-exhaustive overview of Seymour’s four and a half decades on this earth, primarily guided—starting in the 1930s—by his contact sheets and publications. The book, moreover, contains more than a hundred excellent reproductions that bring home the extraordinary power of Chim’s photographic gaze.(…) Her excellent biography should serve to rekindle the public’s interest in one of the most compelling photographers of the twentieth century.”

 

Magnum announcement: Searching for the Light

His life was marked by almost constant war. And it was war that took him, just nine years after he co-founded Magnum Photos. Peter Hamilton previews Carole Naggar’s exhaustive new biography of David ‘Chim’ Seymour.

Excerpt: “(Carole Naggar’s remarkable new biography of perhaps the most enigmatic figure among Magnum’s founding fathers – born Dawid Szymin, but known through much of his short but extraordinary life more simply as ‘Chim’ – leaves you thinking, “I would have loved to have met that man.” (…) Naggar’s profound and exhaustive research into Chim’s life covers every possible base, and also touches on contemporary issues, with so many parallels that can be drawn out between the current conflict in Ukraine as an echo of the 1930s.”

 

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