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26/2/2003

David Seymour

IVAM Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno, Valencia

ORGANIZED BY: IVAM – MAGNUM PHOTOS
CURATORS: Josep Vicent Monzó



The exhibition, organized jointly with MAGNUM PHOTOS, comprises a large sample of his oeuvre in a selection of 125 photographs, which will be reproduced in the catalogue edited on the occasion of this exhibition, along with texts by Josep Monzó and Agnès Sire.

David Szymin was born 20 November 1911 in Warsaw, the son of Benjamin Szymin, an important Polish editor, and lived from 1914 to 1919 in Russia with his family. In 1929 he began his Graphic Art and Photography studies at the Akademia der Graphischen und Buch Künste in Leipzig, Germany, where he specialized in new printing techniques for coloured images. In 1931, with his studies just completed, he moved to Paris to broaden his knowledge of Physics and Chemistry at the Sorbonne.

The political problems that arose in Poland around that time seriously affected his father’s business, and thanks to David Rappaport, a family friend who had set up the Rap agency, who gave him his first 35 mm camera in 1932 and advised him to start taking photographs, he became David Seymour, the photographer who was to sign his works with the name Chim.

He began to collaborate with magazines like Vu, Regards, Ce Soir, La Vie Ouvrière..., travelling all over Europe to capture the most important situations of a society enduring the events that marked most of 20th century history with his glance. In 1935, he photographed Romain Rolland and André Malraux, among others, and took part in the Congress for the defense of culture in Paris. In 1936, his interest in the different social movements brought him to Spain to cover the Civil War, where he got one of his best reports by photographing the situation of civilians in Barcelona.

He continued his travels around North Africa and Czechoslovakia, and in 1939 he emigrated to the United States and started a series of reports about Spanish refugees in Mexico after the Civil War had ended. In 1940, he set up a studio in New York and in 1942, he was granted American citizenship. He joined the Navy as a volunteer, and served as a prestigious photographer until his discharge with the rank of lieutenant in 1945. He reassumed his travels around Europe, Israel, Egypt, photographing the atmosphere of the different countries at war, but also skilfully capturing their customs and ceremonies. Famous characters are treated with the same intensity as children or other anonymous people, to create the personal travel album of this great, committed photographer.

With Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson and George Rodger, he founded the cooperative agency MAGNUM PHOTOS in Paris and New York in 1947, with the intention of looking after photographers’ interests and controlling the publication of their works, not only as regards their technical or professional aspects, but in the mass media closest to their political ideas. He published in the best magazines of the time and started a series about lost, crippled or sick children, committing himself so deeply that even though he was unmarried, he took in and adopted many children, whom he educated and found a new home for through his friends. In 1948, the UNESCO commissioned him to make a book about the situation of children in Europe after the war.

From 1954 to 1956 he was the chairman of MAGNUM PHOTOS, although he continued to work as a photographer at the same time, until he was shot 10 November while making a report on the Suez Canal, a few days before armistice was declared.
His work can be found in the best public and private collections and he is considered to be one of the Great Masters of Photography. Important one-man and group exhibitions of his work have been organized by MAGNUM PHOTOS.



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Guillem de Castro, 118 Valencia
tel +34 963869997

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