Chim is him: discovering David Szymin

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Jan, 2008 by Robert Flynn Johnson

"[He] had the intelligence of a chess player; with the air of a math teacher, he applied his profession.... Chim picked up his camera the way a doctor takes his stethoscope out of his bag, applying his diagnosis to the condition of the heart. His own was vulnerable. "--Henri Cartier-Bresson

IF YOU DO NOT know who David Seymour is or, for that matter, you never have heard the name Chim before, do not feel bad. They are one and the same. Although not well-known to the general public, he was a highly regarded photojournalist and a co-founder of the famous cooperative known as Magnum Photos. Many of his images are quite famous, and you probably know them by sight, but have not been able to connect them to a particular photographer, time, or place. In fact, they are by this man, David Seymour.

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It all gets a little confusing. Seymour's original name--when he was born in Poland in 1911--was David Szymin. Yet, it was so difficult to pronounce that, when the young man went to Paris to study in the sciences, and found that he needed to supplement his income through working as an aspiring photographer, it simply was easier for him to come up with a moniker for his last name and that moniker was Chim (which is how people outside his homeland seemed to be pronouncing his name).

Photography is not a sensibility of one size fits all; it has different roots back to its origins in the early 1840s. Photography can be documentary, propaganda, fine art, or, as in Chim's case, current events. When Chim took up photography in the 1930s, he was very lucky in that he ran into two young aspiring photographers who also went on to enjoy great success in that field. One was the Hungarian-born Robert Capa and the other was the French-born Henri Cartier-Bresson.

These three men became friends--lifelong friends. About a decade or so into their friendship, they, along with George Rodger, formed a photographers cooperative called Magnum--a photo agency that was not run by businessmen telling photographers what to do. Instead, the photographers themselves ran it. Consequently, it was much more sympathetic to their goals as artists and practitioners of the medium. Magnum celebrated its 60th anniversary last year with a major show at the International Center for Photography in New York.

Chim was a photographer that had very progressive ideas politically. He was not a Communist, but he very much was on the socialist-leftist side of things. Chim's photographs during his early days in Paris and, later, in 1936 when he went to Spain during the Spanish Civil War, tend to be on the side of the workers in France as well as the loyalists who were fighting against the rebels (the Francisco Franco army in Spain).

One of Chim's most famous photographs was of the 1936 land distribution meeting during the Spanish Civil War; it shows a woman in a crowd--in the hot, broiling sun--straining to hear the words of the speaker, while a child nurses at her breast. It is a work that has sentiment, but not sentimentality, while showing the harsh conditions that Chim and those he was photographing had to endure during those brutal days. The image conveys the great sense of insecurity that was present during the Spanish Civil War.

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Chim also was very much part of the intellectual community of Paris at the time. In 1937, he took another famous photograph--of Pablo Picasso standing before the painting "Guemica," the abstract artist's great indictment of fascism and the involvement of the Germans with Franco in the destruction of the town. Here, Picasso stands, smoking and diminutive, but powerful and kind of equal to the painting behind him, which shows a section of Guemica that was made specifically for the Spanish Pavilion of the World's Fair in Paris that year.

China was somebody who followed his stories. In fact, he once got on a boat with loyalist refugees who were going to Mexico and took photographs when they landed. He was a man who got around as a photojournalist; he was not one for setting up subjects in a studio in order to take pretty pictures. He had to go where the news was; that was important to who he was in his role as an inquiring, thoughtful photo journalist.

When World War II arrived, Chim resided in the U.S.; he had become an American citizen, and eventually was drafted and sent to war. At that time, he felt that it would not be good for him to have a Polish-Jewish name in case the Germans captured him; so, he changed his name to David Seymour. He thought it sounded very aristocratic and English.

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From his very beginnings, one of the elements of Chim's photography is that he was an unabashed humanist. He was not particularly interested in landscapes or still lifes. What characterizes his photos to a great extent is people--people in their daily lives and people that sum up a situation, the zeitgeist of that particular moment.

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In 1947-48, the United Nations sent Chim to Europe to take photographs of the relocated children that, even a few years after World War II, remained in refugee camps. UNESCO wanted it to be known that the war was not over in terms of the displacement of refugees in Europe. In a sense, the war still was going on--not necessarily bullets flying, but lives remained terribly disrupted.