PARIS PROFESSIONAL DEBUTS:
From Szymin to Chim. (1932-1935)

Carole Naggar, July 15, 2007

After Szymin had completed his studies in Leipzig, he went back home for a few months, expecting to join into the family firm. But he found that since his departure economic and political conditions had taken a turn for the worse. Until then, he may have seen himself as following in his father’s footsteps, in the familiar shadow of the famous writers he remembered from his childhood, and applying to the printed page the most recent modernist trends in typography and layout that he had learnt in Leipzig.

Now the future he had envisioned did not make sense. Fascism and anti-Semitism were on the rise, boycotts and attacks against Jewish businesses a frequent occurrence. Since Poland did not encourage in Jews a sense of belonging, Zionism became the chosen outlet for feelings of national pride. His community, numbering 370,000 and representing 38% of the Warsaw population, which once had had a cultural impact comparable to that of the Jewish community in New York today, now felt frightened, vulnerable, and powerless. It had become a precarious world, vulnerable to social upheaval, and itself split between modernity and tradition.

Conscious of this, many in his generation wanted to emigrate but possibilities were scant: the US had instigated a strict quota, and so had Great Britain, the gateway to Palestine. In France too, few were accepted. Therefore, Szymin was one of the lucky few that were able to leave when they decided to, and escape the fate of their generation, which has been called “the generation without a future”.

With his family’s help –they had promised him a monthly allowance- he decided to enroll at the Sorbonne in Paris: Arriving in the Spring of 1932, he got his German diploma translated and registered at the Faculty of Science at the Sorbonne for a B.A. in Science with a major in advanced chemistry and physics. His student card bears his portrait with a striped shirt, a sweater, a tweed jacket, a dark tie, quite a formal attire for a student. This elegant, almost fastidious appearance would change little over the years and become his landmark style. Perhaps for residency purposes he kept a student registration until 1935, even though he had by then completed his courses (1).

More than most, Szymin had been exposed to European culture since childhood. But he had never known anything like Paris in the 1930s. The city has since become the stuff of myths, as evidenced by the number of books dedicated to that period, from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Risesto Janet Flanner’s Paris Journal. It is true that the ebullience in the arts, literature, theater, dance, film was extraordinary: Jean Arp and Theo Van Doesburg had just founded the group Abstraction-Création; Picasso and Toulouse-Lautrec had their first retrospective and Serge Lifar authored his first choreographies; André Malraux published La Condition Humaine…and these are but a few of the landmarks of the early 1930s. Jean Renoir, Pabst, Alexandre Korda, Julien Duvivier, René Clair were the most prominent filmmakers. The Venice Biennale recognized cinema as an art form and had its first cinema festival. The Pierre Colle Gallery exhibited the surrealists, Le Corbusier inaugurated his Swiss Pavilion at the Cité Universitaire de Paris, painter Balthus and sculptress Germaine Richier made their public début in Paris, The Institute of Psychoanalysis was created on the initiative of Marie Bonaparte the same year as Louis Armstrong gave a triumphal concert at Salle Pleyel.Technical advances included the beginning of aerial transports, washing machines and television. Peugeot, Simcas and Citroens were becoming a common sight in the Paris streets, replacing the horse drawn carts that had rolled on the cobbled streets of Paris and Warsaw alike.

But in Germany Hitler was rising to power. In Dessau, the Bauhaus had been dissolved on the “advice” of Nazi authorities, and on May 10, 1933 in Berlin and all the major university towns in Germany, Goebbels ordered a public autodafeof books considered “decadent, corruptive and foreign to German spirit”. It would not be long until a slew of artists, filmmakers, and photographers started immigrating to Paris, New York and Chicago.

Because his father’s business had started faltering and he did not want to impose on them, Szymin soon made the decision to support himself while studying He probably took up photography as early as 1932: that year he already carried a Polish journalist card, the evidence of an episodic collaboration with Ruan, a photo agency in Warsaw dedicated to press and publicity (1) The following year he contacted a friend of the family, David Rappaport, who had a small photo agency: Agence Rap. From its office in the fifth arrondissement, rue des Fossés St Jacques, the agency was supplying pictures for the publishing industry and for magazines and newspapers. Szymin borrowed a Vidom, a 35mm camera from the agency and soon was1taking his own photographs. The technical knowledge he had acquired in Leipzig and his precise, mathematical mind must have helped him in mastering the technical aspect of photography. ‘Chim was an excellent technician thanks to his German formation” said Jean Marquis, who would later become his colleague. (2)

Like Brassai and Kertesz in the same period, Szymin was especially interested in exploring the city’s nightlife, from the Metro to the workers of Les Halles. But contrary to Kertész he completely avoided the tourist spots: no shots of Montmartre basilica or Notre Dame cathedral, the most visited spots in the city, can be found on his early contact sheets, and only one pictorial study of the Eiffel Tower.

The Café du Dôme in Montparnasse, the 14^tharrondissement on Paris’s Left Bank close to La Ruche, an artist community where many Russian painters had settled in the early 1920s, was a meeting place for Hungarian émigrés, among which Kertész and his group: Gyula Zilzer, Lajos Tihanyi, Istvan Beöthy, and Tivadar Fried. Among them Kertész would be the only one to attain an international reputation. Szymin probably met Kertész in 1933: that year they were listed, together with Cartier-Bresson and others, in a group show. Andre Friedmann, later known as Robert Capa, was also a frequent feature at Le Dôme, and that may be where Capa and Szymin struck a friendship that would lead to the founding of Magnum Photo agency in 1947 and last until Capa’s untimely death in 1954.

In his first Paris photographs, Szymin was probably influenced by documentarians such as Erich Salomon that he had seen in the German illustrated magazines available in Leipzig. But contrary to Salomon he was shy and did not like to take pictures on the sly. He was still staying at a distance from his subjects, except for some portraits of friends. He was not drawn to glamour but to the vulnerable and the dispossessed: an older woman in a ratty black coat, begging because she had lost her pension; a group of Parisian clochardsunder a bridge at night, warming their hands to a small fire; scrap metal workers; street kids, standing in a doorway or rooting for food in garbage cans; shantytowns on the outskirts of Paris, at Porte de Vitry or Porte de Choisy. In one of those early pictures, a woman, her feet planted in the mud, a large bundle on her head, turns her back on the viewer. Szymin also photographed workers sitting on the sidewalk, eating their lunch, and made the trip to the suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt to photograph the exit of the Renault car factory.

Attracted to the more traditional trades- maybe because they were closer to his street life experience in Warsaw- he also photographed welders, carpenters, and butchers in les Halles, flea markets, shipyard workers. In Paris’s Marais, the fourth arrondissement, home to kosher shops and a newly erected Art Nouveau synagogue by Hector Guimard, who also had recently designed the gracious welded iron entrances to Paris’s Metro, he found scenes reminiscent of the Warsaw ghetto, as in his portrait of a bearded Jew in tail suit and back hat in his second-hand clothing store, in front of a mountain of rags. He also visited the Jewish Social Services, and his photographs show the wounded and the maimed as well as the newborns.

In a different vein from his straightforward and documentarian approach, other photographs show attention to geometric planes and contrasts of light and shadow and denote the influence of Bauhaus and Constructivism, a strong component in the program at the Leipzig Academy. A 1935 picture of the Medrano circus, for instance, has a flattened perspective, strong geometrical composition and contrasts between the dark mass of a horse and the white-clad body of the trainer; the taut horizontal rope in his left hand closes the triangle opened by the outstretched legs of a clown lying in the foreground, his arms parallel to the picture’s frame. In the background, the faces of an attentive crowd are blurred, grey dots as if in a charcoal sketch. Szymin also started to use tilted perspectives, close-ups and bird’s eye views: a queue of people waiting in front of an open-air food display are shot from above, capturing the geometric patterns of the bodies and their projected shadows. Another picture, shot in the Bercy warehouses, where wine is stocked before being sent to stores and restaurants, focuses on the accumulation of the barrels and their geometric patterns. Szymin was already fascinated by the strong geometric and graphic quality of posters by Cassandre, Colin and other masters, that would be a few years after a strong component of his photographs of the Front Populaire: on Paris walls he sought strong, giant-sized posters such as a publicity for the Rasurel swimsuits, for Scandale corsets or for the Navigation Aérienne company which he contrasted with the hurried, blurred form of passers-by.

A portrait of a woman, certainly a friend of Szymin, wearing a white muslin collar adorned with a rose is remarkable by its use of light and shadow dividing her face. Another woman’s portrait, backlit in a small room, is an image partly bathed in shadows, head titled in front of the strong shape of a knotted curtain. Another yet, a severe beauty, is seen from above so that her very white face assumes a triangular form. With her hair pulled back from her face and her collar drawn against it, it evokes the portrait of his wife Lucy by Moholy-Nagy that Szymin may well have seen at the Film und Fotoexhibition in Stuttgart two years earlier.

Unlike Brassai and Kertesz, Szymin did not seem interested in photographing nudes. There are only two erotic photographs of his years in Paris, and perhaps of his entire career- that is, personal photographs, not assignments to shoot Italian starlettesin the 1950s for illustrated magazines One has been taken in a music hall, and focuses on a Black dancer on the scene, gesticulating, blurred, backlit, with gigantic shadows emphasizing his wild movements. Another, much more intimate, is of a woman whose face, tilted back, remains mostly hidden, whose transparent, filmy black voile dress showcases her breasts and sex. The photograph has a mysterious, almost surreal quality. There is a woman with exactly such a dress in Brassai’s book Secret Paris of the 1930s. Brassai’s woman was shot at Suzy’s, a small brothel in the Quartier Latin, the Latin Quarter; rue Grégoire de Tours, in Brassai’s words “one of the discreet houses that guaranteed the anonymity of the guests. Even priests got in and out without being seen or recognized.”  The Madam was a music lover, and – if his picture was really shot there-, it would have amused Szymin that she adored all the great arias from famous operas.

Photography was opening up Szymin’s world and his life was changing:  he had found a purpose. In November of 1933, he wrote his girlfriend Emma in Warsaw: “I am working, running, seeing fascinating things. I am getting to know Paris, I am becoming a part of it.”(3)  He started selling his pictures to Paris Soir, Ce Soirand Voilà,and to match his new life chose a new name, “Chim” for his byline. Shorter and easier to pronounce in a French context, Chim also evokes his former name while erasing his Jewishness. It symbolizes the distance he is taking from his youth in Warsaw and his family, his identification to a new milieu, international and laic <<??>>, turned towards the values of socialism and humanism. “No one called him David,” photographer Burt Glinn recalls “We called him Chim, Chimou, Chimsky” (4). In his youth, too, as his niece Helen remembers, his family and friends had not called him David, but Dawidek, Didek or Dik. It is as if his gentle personality had always made other protective (even when they searched his counsel) and attracted these familiar and tender surnames.

Chim did not know it yet, but Paris would become his new hometown, and he would not go back to Poland until after the war, in 1948,to discover the wreckage of his city and his memory, the death of his parents at the hand of the Nazi, and the destruction of the European Jews.

It is a long time ago, and witnesses differ: Was it on a bus on Boulevard Montparnasse, because Cartier-Bresson was carrying a Leica (the too shiny brand-name taped over) strapped around his neck with an old belt, and the sleek portable camera had attracted Chim’s attention? Or at the offices of Ce Soir, a communist newspaper? Or maybe at a meeting of the AEAR, the Association des Ecrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires, that he encountered his colleague Henri Cartier-Bresson (who was then signing his pictures “Henri Cartier”)?

Fearing the mounting popularity of the fascist and Nazi ideologies, European writers and intellectuals had decided to unite ad demonstrate in their work and in public demonstrations, against the rising nationalisms. They felt that European culture was in danger, and that it was up to them to save it. Prominent French intellectuals and politicians, some affiliated to the Communist party, some not, such as Paul Vaillant-Couturier, Henri Barbusse, Romain Rolland, Frantz Jourdain had founded the AEAR, a French section of the Union Internationale des Ecrivains Révolutionnaires, in March 1932. Its first public demonstration against fascism took place on March 21, 1933, under the presidency of André Gide (6) and with help of André Malraux (7) and Jean Guéhenno (8). The AEAR soon founded a choir with a militant repertory that participated in all public occasions, an important factor in drawing crowds. One of their hits was The Song of the Unemployed:

“Work and Bread
It is our war cry.
Enough! Enough of misery
As an eternal friend (…)

We are hungry but wheat is plentiful-
Our masters prefer to burn it.
We are cold, but coal is piled
On the tiles of deserted wells.”

Cartier-Bresson was already well known in European circles, and his work had been exhibited regularly. He came from an affluent family of thread manufacturers, had been influenced by Surrealism, and before taking to photography had studied painting under traditionalist André Lhôte. Chim, who was living in a small studio apartment in the southern suburb of Montrouge, struck up a friendship with Henri and introduced him to a Hungarian émigré, André Friedman, who had taken the name of Capa. Outspoken and decisive, Capa became a major influence on Cartier-Bresson and persuaded him that keeping the label “surrealist” would isolate him: he should call himself a photojournalist. As a group, the three friends were in sharp physical contrast: Capa’s dark hair and eyes, his tanned complexion and heavy eyebrows, lent him an exotic air; Cartier-Bresson, tall and thin with light hair that he combed back, had an unobtrusive, very French physique that allowed him to blend in a crowd and photograph without being spotted. His only remarkable trait was his piercing blue eyes. As for Chim, short and somewhat rotund, he was already balding and wearing Coke-bottle glasses. But his style was impeccable and he would not have gone out without dark polished shoes, a pressed suit, and a tie. The three men shared an uncanny gift to relate to anyone socially, from the very poor to the wealthy.

Besides their passion for photography, the three friends shared their political leftist orientation, their love of women and of having a good time- from the cafés and their pinballs to restaurants and, especially for Capa, the races. It is in Paris that Chim acquired his taste, almost an obsession, for gourmet food and, little by little, as his finances improved, he got to know all the best places to eat, even in the most out-of-the way neighborhoods.

Chim, Capa, and Cartier-Bresson soon shared Chim’s place and Chim converted the bathroom into a darkroom. As a member of the AEAR, Chim had his first group show in November- December 1933 at the Gallery of the Bookstore ESI, in the Quartier Latin, 24 rue Racine. (5)

By then, Chim was photographing regularly: In 1933, he had already earned 10.000 francs in assignments- of which “Rap” took 50%. But it is in the spring of 1934 that Chim’s career was really launched, when he was hired as a full-time collaborator by the weekly magazine Regards.

Regardshad previously been a monthly, Regards sur le Monde du Travail(A Look at the Working World). Under the direction of Henri Barbusse, with a prestigious editorial committee that included André Gide, Romain Rolland and Maxime Gorki, the large-format magazine considered itself a platform whose mission was to educate and instruct French workers. Among the contributing writers were Louis Aragon, Henri Barbusse, Ilya Ehrenburg, Arthur Koestler, André Malraux, Paul Nizan. The photographers included Brassai, who when he was not earning a living with journalism, was working on his seminal book Paris By Night, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Gerda Taro, a very young and flamboyant German Jewish photographer recently established in Paris and who would make her reputation in the Spanish Civil War, and become Capa’s great love. The Regardscontributors’ goal of fighting for the interests of the workers, for truth, for picture propaganda of socialism, echoed the views of Egon Erwin Kisch, one of the magazine’s collaborators, who had thus defined photo-reportage:

“Nothing is more amazing than the simple truth, nothing is more exotic than our own surroundings, nothing is more fantastic in effect than objective description. And nothing is more remarkable than the time in which we live.”

This desire to present contemporary life in its immediacy and to clarify our understanding of it seems to have animated both journalists and photojournalists of the 1930s.

However, as Regardsalready knew, photography may be truthful but it is not neutral: most photojournalists at that time saw it as a means to express their feelings and their point of view, to redress social inequality ; they were driven by an immense hope, that of winning the readers to their point of view, of changing the world while they recorded it. Seventy years later, compassion fatigue has set in and in our increasingly mediatized world; it may be hard to echo this sentiment. But this is definitely a conviction that Chim made his, and in that sense Paris was essential in consolidating his ethical values as well as refining his photographic abilities.

Chim’s new name, the copyright to be found under his photographs, signaled that, in a way, he felt himself to have been born again in a “family of friendships”.

Regards ‘s political line was strongly pro-USSR, considering it as “the only country in the world where millions of proletarians and kolkhozians are masters and creators.”  It is a paradox that Chim, who had to suffer in Russia as a child first while Poland was under Russian tutelage, then when his family was forced to immigrate to Ukraine and to Odessa, would subscribe to such a program. He never formally joined the Communist Party; but it is probable that the idea of joining forces between intellectual and manual workers was appealing to him because of his strongly technical, hands-on background, while the enthusiasm held by Regardscollaborators about culture and the arts must have reminded him of the atmosphere in his father’s publishing house. Regardsbelieved in humanistic values, grounded in peace and egalitarianism, that would bring together people from different backgrounds and countries, surely another appealing trait for Chim.

Just three years after the American Depression, the economic climate in France was degenerating. Unemployment was on the rise. The Daladier and Boncourt government gave its resignation. Following aggressive demonstrations by the right wing, Nazi-inspired group Croix de Feu, social unrest culminated in the February 6, 1934 demonstrations in which workers and the police clashed head on. Police violence rose to incredible levels as police cars ran over workers voluntarily, and groups of communists and fascists fought each other ruthlessly. In Regardsdated 9 and 16 of February, a report states: “At two o’clock, at the Beaujon hospital, a male nurse, his blouse drenched in blood, tells me: ‘I am not allowed to tell you how many dead there are. Only here, there have been 200 wounded…’ ” The writer describes the street atmosphere:

“The rue de Rivoli until the Hotel de Ville is of a formidable tragic spirit in the emptiness of the street and of the night serrated by flashes of projectors, lined by the flames that furiously come out of the root of the broken lampposts that block the street, and, from time to time, a van full of police meet where the truncheons throw their white stain, or else a squad of guards on horseback shatter the silence.”

These battles turn into enormous street demonstrations in the whole country: 150,000 demonstrators in Paris only and huge numbers also in Marseille, Lyon, Bordeaux, and other major cities. An antifascist popular front is called together to stop the homegrown fascists. First known as the “Comité National du Rassemblement Populaire”, its professed goals are expressed in the slogan “Le Pain, la Paix, la Liberté” (Bread, Peace and Freedom). Under their leader, Maurice Thorez, the Communists work openly for the first time in an alliance with the Socialist parties.

At the end of February 1934, Chim makes his débuts with reportage on unemployment, with a text by Pierre Bochot “Diary of an Unemployed Man” with a second installment on March 2. He works in 35mm and photographs long queues of men in front of the Théâtre du Châtelet who hope for small parts as extras: “four francs to be an idiot between nine o’clock and midnight” states one of them. In one photograph, a young man sells books of matches. Another picture, in stark contrast, is a night shot of the Place du Châtelet with its beautiful soft lights and a large sculpted stone fountain. In the morning, the jobless men can be seen again at Les Halles where they jostle for small jobs of porters. They live in 40 francs a week rooms, in shabby hotels such as the Hotel Electricité. The room is dark even in daylight.”Oh, how dark is the room,” exclaims one of them “but there is electricity”, answers the concierge.  In the March 2 issue, Chim’s photographs show unemployed men selling ties on the sly. Pierre Bochot described the scene:

“Two francs each, your choice, all colors!  He whistles through his fingers. Suitcases are closed and fly away. In the blink of an eye all the peddlers have disappeared and the bête noireof the street, the man that they have a thousand reasons to hate, the guardian of established disorder, the enemy, kepi on the eye, enters the scene: the street is his.”

The idea of the integrity of the photograph as we know it nowadays is not that of Regards, where, as in most magazines of the time, pictures are seen not as a language of its own but as a means to an end: they are casually cut up in circles or trapezes, superimposed, partly obscured by titles or columns of text, mounted together as in a scrambled visual puzzle.

In 1934 the right-wing leagues such as Action Française,les Croix de Feu and Les Camelots du Roiwere on the rise. On April 20^thChim did a feature on the assassination of Joseph Fontaine, a communist militant, by the right-wing Action Françaisegroup, in the northern town of Hénin-Liétard (Pas de Calais). Chim’s photographs run with a text by Pierre Bochot finishing with the sentence in capital letters: “We will avenge you”. Chim and Bochot are credited as “envoyés spéciaux” —special correspondents, a definite rise in status for Chim who through his contact with a wide variety of social topics has polished his style: He is methodical and improvises very little. He believes in background checking, in careful preparation, and it is often only after following the writer and listening to the interviews that he starts taking pictures. He thinks his stories through and though he is aware that the editors will heavily intervene, thinks in terms of sequences that are both conceptual and pictorial, that will convey the story while engaging the reader’s emotions. The careful construction and sequencing of these stories, even the very first ones, leads us to believe that Chim wanted to control his publications and may well have come to the editor with a prepared sequence of photographs, an unusual step at a time when photography was still considered as secondary to text, more an illustration than a language of its own. But Chim’s Leipzig experience of modernism, especially his knowledge of Moholy-Nagy’s work on sequences, must have been a strong influence as he tried to balance meaning and graphic strength in these early reportages.

Bochot and Chim continued to work as a team and their byline often appeared together. It is very possible that Parisian-born Bochot served as a guide, showing Chim aspects of Paris he did not yet know. On April 6,1934, Bochot’s article “Dans l’engrenage de Billancourt” (Inside Billancourt’s  Gear) on the Renault Factories is illustrated by Chim’s photographs. The picture editor has gone a bit mad: Chim’s photos, cut up into round shapes, are fitted into the contour of a wheel’s gear and the dynamic typography, inserted on the outside, seems to rotate with the wheels. In the April 27^th  follow-up of the story, a title runs diagonally across a picture of the workers’ crowd leaving the factory, taken from above, and horizontally over a close-up portrait of two workers with wrinkled, exhausted faces:” They get out of the factory at full speed. It looks like lava flowing because they are all the same, mute, depressed, gray! It is like a terrible explosion of gaunt faces with haggard eyes. They have crushed shoulders, hollow chests, ponderous arms and enormous hands, heavy like tools,” Bochot writes in his vivid, dramatic style. A third part to the Billancourt story was published on May 27.

On April 13, Chim reported on a new school, the Groupe scolaire Octobre, a pilot project that had just been built in Alfortville, in the Parisian suburbs. It featured three different buildings: a kindergarten, a structure for boys and one for girls, and also a professional school for boys as well as a nursing room, a sports field, resting rooms and a solarium. The editor laid out Chim’s photographs in a vertical strip, like a film, featuring “back to school” after the vacation, study in a well-lit classroom, recess and a parade in the Alfortville streets to celebrate the school’s opening.

Throughout the year, Chim continued to publish regularly in Regardsand was given important assignments. On May 20 a piece entitled Le fascisme ne passera pas(Fascism Will Not Prevail), features several portraits credited to Chim: one of André Malraux, one of Leo Vannes, from the Anti-Imperialism League, one of Marcel Cachin and one of Professor Langevin, a celebrity from the scientific world, as well as an aerial view of the crowd and pictures of the Cirque d’Hiver Congress with over 3,000 delegates.

Chim covered the International Congress of the Writers on April 24. In spite of the difficult working conditions – he was on the floor in a crowded hall, and the light was very poor- Chim managed beautiful individual portraits of André Gide, André Malraux, who had just become famous for his book “La Condition Humaine”(The Human Condition), Aldous Huxley and Alexis Tolstoy.

Later, in Barbusse’s office at the newspaper Monde, Chim made a group portrait of intellectuals surrounding Henri Barbusse. The portrait is very lively and manages to capture vividly the individual expressions of the sitters, a feat considering that Chim was given only a very short time to do the portrait.

On May 6, Chim had the cover of Regardswith a shot of a very large demonstration for “Unity of action against the fascist war”.

On June 1, Chim made reportage at the Mur des Fédérésthat commemorates the days of the Commune in the Père Lachaise cemetery, with a picture of Leon Blum against the wall dedicated to the dead of 1871 and one of a famous Communist choir playing the trumpet and singing in front of the wall. The ceremony had attracted 35,000 people. Two years later, one of Chim’s photographs taken in the same spot would be published in LIFE magazine: Willy Ronis, a French photographer who was starting out at the time and had just met Chim, remembers:

“I have known Chim shortly after he came from Poland to Paris. He developed his photos in a maid’s room. He had learnt that I was working with my father who had a photography studio. He asked if he could glaze his photographs on our glazing machine. At times, we were working on identical political subjects. There is a photograph he made at the Mur des Fédérés of a famous singing choir of four young men. When I saw this photograph in the jubilee issue of LIFE, I thought that it was mine, but in fact we were one behind the other when we were shooting.” (9)

Ronis, a gifted photographer but a loner, most probably became a bit jealous of his friend’s rising fame and saw him less, using the pretext that Chim was hanging out with a group of émigrés who were, according to him “bitter and self-promoting”. He preferred to hang out with Capa, which he found “more optimistic and less tormented” than Chim. Capa was always the life of the party, downplaying his mounting reputation and capable of relating to just about anyone.

Chim, in contrast with Ronis’s proud and shy personality, had become incredibly gifted at public relations. His physique was not seductive— at twenty-three, his hairline was already receding and his tender, chestnut-colored, melancholy eyes were hidden behind horn-rimmed glasses— but probably because of his capacity for listening and empathy, he could make friends in every walk of life and persuade people in charge to give him access where other photographers were denied. 

Regardspursued their study of the workers’ world with a piece by Egon Ewin Kisch on Joris Iven’s recent documentary film on coal mines—Ivens was a left-wing Dutch film-maker— and expanded abroad with a series, started early May, of Theodore Dreiser on unemployment in the United States. Through his friendship with Cartier-Bresson who was an early admirer of Walker Evans’s classical and restrained style, Chim may have learnt about Roy Striker’s Farm Security Administration project and seen pictures of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn and others in the group.

In the summer of 1934 Chim, pursuing his in-depth study of French society, worked again with Pierre Bochot on a three-part story about taxi drivers in the Levallois suburb of Paris: Levallois, Ville des taxis, published on June 8,15 and 22. It is an analysis of the life of people who work ten-hour days and often make less than 30 francs daily. On this story again Chim worked at night until dawn, focusing on the taxi drivers and the mechanics. His photographs are credited only in the third part of the piece but his picture style is easily recognizable. The photographs remain elegant and well composed but have taken on a stark quality that matches their subject matter and Chim’s deeper political commitment.

On July 7 and 13, 1934 Chim and Pierre Bochot, who is in charge of the interviews, publish again together a “grand reportage” in two parts on Paris slums: Paris Taudis.

They visit the slums that remain in the small, ancient streets of the Marais, right in the heart of Paris: rue la Reynie, rue de Venise, rue Simon Lefranc and rue Saint-Martin, are in the third and fourth arrondissements on the Right Bank, close to chic neighborhoods. They also visit the slums of the thirteenth arrondissement, where living conditions are medieval. They focus on a man named Paulin and record his transactions to buy furniture on credit and procure food for his family.

In France unemployment is now at its peak and affects all social classes, even intellectuals, engineers, students and doctors: some of the medical students, after completing their studies, have to work for 8 francs a day in hospitals as they can find no other jobs.

Regards’ scope is not limited to France: reporters such as Kyochi Souzouki, P.L.Forster and Vladimir Pozner bring back articles from Africa, Japan, Mexico, the USSR, the U.S., Germany, Czechoslovakia, Austria – where Pozner enthusiastically describes the fight of the Left against Hitler and Mussolini, the red flags suspended from telegraphic cables, the chalked slogans on house walls. A feminist writer, Suzanne Jouhannet, reports on women, fascism, and war. She questions a peasant in the Chartres region:

“-What do they say about war in your parts?

-Many of us here won’t go. For four years, we, the women, have worked like horses. We have seen everything, known everything. And what did we get for it? Nothing. Harder work, debts, worries. And so many dead we had! We did not even have time to cry for them. Now we do not believe the lies of all these handsome gentlemen! If they want to croak, well, we’ll be happy to help them, all these hyenas that war fattens.”

In the September 7 and September 14 issues, Chim, this time associated with journalist Etienne Constant, publishes a study on the effect of the economic crisis on the small craftsmen of Paris. Shoemakers, embroiders, milliners, upholsterers, carpenters, hatters, cabinetmakers – all of them cannot make ends meet. They work mainly in the southeast of Paris in the19^thand 20^tharrondissements, then the center of artisans’ life.

It is August, and the heat is unbearable. The poorly ventilated rooms are submerged with fetid odors rising from the uncollected trash. For economic reasons, thousands of artisans work from home: the same room does triple duty as bedroom, kitchen, and atelier. For the last installment of the story, Chim and Constant work mainly in the fourth arrondissement, in the old days an aristocratic neighborhood but now inhabited by Jewish artisans. “In front of shops where live carps and chicken killed according to ritual are sold, buyers are haggling and you could not say if they come from Poland or Spain, Rumania or Germany” Constant writes. Rue des Rosiers, rue Charlemagne, Rue de la Verrerie, rue Vieille-du-Temple, rue Fauconnier, rue Ave Maria, those are teaming with life:  it seems as if everyone lives in the street.

Maybe because Chim can easily relate to such scenes, similar to those he witnessed as a child in the Nalewski Street courtyard where his parents publishing house was, this part of the reportage is less tragic than the previous installments:

-“You work even on Saturdays? I ask my old Polish friend, a hatter.”

-But I eat on Saturdays like on other days…our line of work is intensive only for one or two weeks before the holidays. You have to take advantage of these occasions to make a small profit”.

On October 12, Spain for the first time has a Regardscover with reportage by George Sadoul “Revolution in Spain”. A photograph of demonstrators bears the title “Hail the revolutionary combatants of Spain”. The following week, October 18, the Oviedo commune is on the cover.

Chim continues to focus on French working life. In three consecutive issues, October 18, 25 and November 2, he authors an in-depth reportage: Marius, fils de Marseille(Marius, son of Marseille): rather than studying a group of people, he focuses this time on a single symbolic character; he follows Marius, a fisherman’s son whose family lives in the Panier, a popular neighborhood close to the harbor, and who dropped out of school when he was thirteen. Marius is looking for work. For the moment Marius works on the open-air market in Grand’ Rue in the morning, and in the evening he sells newspapers such as Le Soleiland Le Radical Sportif. Sometimes he works aboard a large fishing boat, a chalutier. But his dream is to be a mechanics and work in a garage. Thanks to a friend of his father, le Père Titin, he gets a job as an apprentice in a garage but his luck does not last: with the crisis of small businesses he finds himself jobless and has to work as a cabin crew on a transatlantic ship: he gets to see China, Indochina, Singapore and Djibouti, but prefers “le plancher des vaches” (dry land). When he does his military service, he is incorporated in the cavalry, even though he is experienced with engines and wanted to work in aviation.

Continuing his in-depth study of French society and the Depression era’s social and economical problems, Chim coauthors another reportage with writer Louis Gazagnaire, centered on the life of the dockers, carriers of bags of coal or sulfur: exploited by bosses who do not respect contracts, they work for only seven francs a day. Walking on the quays among the large sheds that smell of vanilla beans or rose essence, they connect easily with the workers and strike conversations, giving their piece a direct style reminiscent of Albert Londres:

-“I would like to know,” says one of the workers, quoted by Gazagnaire “if we are dockers or if they are confusing us with tractors.”

-“As a matter of fact” another replies “they are confusing us with slaves”

Chim also authors a reportage on Marseille’s Panierneighborhood where he focuses on children, who, left to their own devices mainly live on the street. They are everywhere – sitting on steps, playing cards or fishing on the quays among prostitutes and sailors. Writer and photographer find a boy who first was a docker then became unemployed. This is the first time that Chim focuses on disenfranchised children and it is immediately apparent how well he relates to them. We see here in germ the same qualities that will be at work fourteen years later, in his famous work on the European children after the war: like the children of Marseille, they rely only on other children and have become detached from any adult help or rules, and have formed a society of their own.

In one of the last issues of the year, December 6, 1934, unsigned photographs bear Chim’s distinctive style. The subject is Soupe populaire(The Soup Kitchen). In the morning, the unemployed go get a soup ticket so they don’t have to queue at lunchtime:

“As early as twenty to eleven, the surroundings of the soup quarters get animated. The crowd of unemployed factory workers can be found with their containers and their pots, their dignified or shameful, violent or resigned poverty. On the faces and the clothing, you can read the slow and horrible progression of misery and suffering.”

On March 21, 1935,Chim has the cover of Regardswith Les Féodaux des Halles(Feudal Lords of Les Halles), a piece on the famous central wholesale market, called by Victor Hugo “The Belly of Paris”. In his text, Pierre Bochot describes the main market as a medieval Miracle Court where all social classes mix:

“Porters and prostitutes, salesmen and policemen, butchers, farmers, restaurant owners, the unemployed, the four seasons sellers and the grocers, shout, insult and fight each other in a setting made of the most beautiful, tastiest and sweetest-smelling produce on earth.”

Taken at first dawn, suffused with a light mist, Chim’s pictures focus on the expressive pantomime of the sellers and the buyers and capture the arrival of the carts and trucks of the providers, the deliverymen hunchbacked under the weight of the vegetables. The photographs have an immediate yet poetic feel that often recall Brassai’s study on the same subject. Chim will always favor open-air markets as a subject, as evidenced, for instance, by his 1950 series on Venice’s Rialto fish market.

In April, Chim continues his study of the working-class neighborhoods with a piece on the Faubourg St Antoine, home to carpenters, cabinetmakers, and wood sculptors. A photograph of a deliveryman pulling a heavily loaded cart has a strong Eastern-European feeling, evoking a photograph of Toso Dabac, a noted photographer from ex Yugoslavia, taken in Zagreb a decade before. Again, the craftsmen that Chim photographs have very little work. Their only order lately has been the furniture for the liner “Normandie”: “The Faubourg St Antoine is dying”. These are dark times in France, with bankruptcies multiplying, salaries cut of as much as 25%, and unemployment skyrocketing to 810,000.

Chim covered for Regardsthe June 21 Writers Congress, held to “discuss the means of defending culture against the dangers that menace her in a certain number of countries”, as written in a public declaration with signatures of André Gide, Jean-Richard Bloch, Romain Rolland, André Malraux, André Chamson, Henri Barbusse… The movement quickly became international with the US, Great Britain, Hungary, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, Spain, the Soviet Union… sending their delegates: Bertold Brecht, Karel Capek, Ilya Ehrenburg, Waldo Frank, Valle Inclan, Heinrich Mann, Robert Musil… among other prestigious European writers, were present. S.L. Shneiderman, a Polish writer and Chim’s brother-in-law, was also part of the Congress. He would later report on the Spanish Civil War (Krieg in Spain– War In Spain, 1938) and Chim would contribute several of his photographs for his book. André Gide inaugurated the Congress:

“Literature has never been more alive … but the intellectual impoverishment of some countries lets us see that culture is under menace. Country to country solidarity and danger of contagion are such nowadays that the examples from our neighbors instruct us, and we all feel more or less under the gun.” (10)

For four days, the writers held intense discussions about the concept of humanism, the problems of creation and dignity of the spirit. The Congress ended on June 25 with the launching of a permanent Paris-based international association for the defense of culture against fascism and war. Meanwhile popular dissatisfaction was growing, and a few days later, on Bastille Day (July, 14t), Paris saw the largest and most organized demonstration with the cooperation of the major political groups, estimated at a half-million.

After the Congress, one of the most important stories that Chim did in 1935 was probably the funeral of Henri Barbusse in the Père Lachaise cemetery. The Père Lachaise, Paris’s largest, oldest and most beautiful cemetery that hosts the tombs of many celebrities from Molière and La Fontaine to Maria Callas, Delacroix and Edith Piaf. It also has strong symbolic value: it is at the Communards’ Wall there that the last defenders of the 1871 Paris Commune were executed.

With writer Romain Rolland, Henri Barbusse had founded the International Antifascist Committee and was a hugely popular figure. His funeral turned into a demonstration attended by over 300,000 people. Moving around constantly, Chim was able to alternate  group shots — of the crowd, of a several of Barbusse’s close friends standing around his grave—with individual close-up shots of subdued, sad demonstrators, such as three schoolgirls in matching berets, fanned in a semi-circle, in front of their teacher or father.

In the September 19 issue Chim, continuing his study of France’s working class, published a photo-essay on the life of the tuna fishermen in Brittany, followed on December 12 by a reportage on the workers in the lace and ribbon textile industry, where hand-embroidery was being replaced by machine work. A three-part essay (August 1, 8 and 22) on the dangerous life of miners in the north of France, though unaccredited, may also be by Chim.

On April 26, 1936, the intense social upheaval and economic crisis that Chim had documented in-depth would culminate with the victory of the movement known as the Front Populaire. The Front Populaire was a broad coalition of the Left and center-Left and of the major trade unions. Its creation was facilitated by a number of factors: the economic crises, the internal threat from the far Right, and the international fascist menace and threat of war.

Under the leadership of Leon Blum as a Prime Minister, the Front Populaire gave the French a slew of new rights among which the workers’ right to unionize, the right for a forty-hour work week, the right to a paid vacation, the “Congés payés”, as well as government subsidies for families with many children. Dissolution of the fascist organizations was ordered.

Regardstruly was the place of Chim’s apprenticeship, the place where he developed his specific style and learnt journalistic techniques: how to make backgrounds checks, how to use existing lighting, even poor, how to tell a concise story in pictures and how to best collaborate with a writer. In contrast with Henri Cartier-Bresson, Chim never was a “decisive moment” proponent and is style, rather than in individual images, best asserts itself in sequences of photographs.

A decade later, Chim would often choose to write himself the text and captions of his stories. Such practice, shared by George Rodger, one of the other cofounders of the Magnum agency, was dubbed “package story”- Chim and Rodger are among its earliest proponents. The magazine Regardsmade him as much as he made the magazine. Even though Chim often sold individual pictures to other magazines such as Ce Soirand Voilà, it is Regardsthat became Chim’s home in France, the first group where he belonged emotionally and intellectually before he became part of Magnum a decade or so later.  Soon he would be expanding his territory beyond Paris and France, and tackle the biggest story in the news as an Envoyé Spécial(Special Correspondent) to Regards: The Spanish Civil War.

Notes

(1) The Ben Shneiderman Archives, Washington D.C.

(2) Interview with Jean and Suzy Marquis, Rambouillet, May 11, 2005.

(3) Quoted by Inge Bondi in Chim: The Photographs of David Seymour, Bullfinch publishers, New York, 1996.

(4) Interview with Burt Glinn, East Hampton, October 2005.

(5) Participants in the show: Barna, Denise Bellon, Jacques-André Boiffard, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Chim, Nora Dumas, Janer, Kertesz, Germaine Krull, Landau, Lemare, Eli Lotar, Man Ray, Makovska, Martel, Moïssi, Roni Ney, Tracol, Zuber, Ylla, and six photographers from the group “Travail” from Budapest.

(6) Noted novelist, founder of the magazine Les Lettres Françaises, Gide became famous when he “came out” as a homosexual in his first novel The Counterfeiters.

(7) Famous writer, adventurer and art critic, Malraux later became Minister of Culture under De Gaulle.

(8) French novelist, critic, essayist, and journalist.

(9) Interview with Willy Ronis, Paris, May 2005.

(10) from George Sadoul’s reportage for Regards, in The Ben Shneiderman Archives, Washington D.C.

(11) Throughout this piece, the documentation on Regardshas been drawn and the texts translated from French from the Regardsmicrofilms hosted at Philadelphia University’s Gutman Library. Richard Whelan has loaned microfilms of Regards1936-1939, now part of the collection of the International Center of Photography, New York.