“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. A new biography sheds light on this photographer, best known as one of the cofounders of photojournalism’s famous cooperative Magnum Photos.
Dawid Szymin was born in Warsaw in 1911, when no independent Polish state existed. Always vulnerable to land grabs from its neighbors—the Russian Empire, the Kingdom of Prussia and the Habsburg Monarchy –, the country would gain only fragile independ...
