GM with Ben Shneiderman on March 22, 2023
Channel: UBC Emeritus College
Date: 23/03/2023

My Uncle, the Legendary Photographer David Seymour-Chim (1911-1956)
with Ben Shneiderman,  Adjunct Professor, Computer Science,  UBC

Dawid Szymin was born in Warsaw to respected publisher Benjamin Szymin, whose home was a center for the Yiddish and Jewish culture of that time. He went to Paris in 1932 to study at the Sorbonne, but took up photography to report on the lively intellectual communities and the political activism of the Front Populaire. Then he became world famous for his coverage of the Spanish Civil War. He served in the US Army during World War II, taking the name David Seymour (see website), and then picked up his camera to photograph the post-war rebuilding efforts and the plight of the orphans of war for UNESCO.

He founded the celebrated Magnum Photos collaborative in 1947, with his close friends Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and George Rodger. Chim's capacity to connect with his subjects gave him the opportunity to photograph Hollywood stars like Ingrid Bergman, Audrey Hepburn, Sophia Loren, and Kirk Douglas. Chim's work appeared regularly in LIFE Magazine, but his life was tragically cut short when he was killed while covering the 1956 Suez Crisis for Newsweek Magazine. 

This talk will show his work and his impact, which continues to grow, most recently by the deeply researched and poetically written biography by Carole Naggar, Searching for the Light and the accompanying video.