The Making of a Photojournalist Named “Chim”

Born Dawid Szymin in Warsaw, Poland, Seymour grew up surrounded by art, music and literature. His father, Benjamin, was a respected publisher of Hebrew and Yiddish books. Dawid, not surprisingly, was an avid reader who also excelled at languages. The bombing of Warsaw in World War I forced the Szymin family to flee to the relative safety of Minsk, Belarus, and later to Odessa in the Ukraine. With the end of the war, they made their way back to Poland, and Benjamin re-established himself in the publishing business. The family thrived in 1920s Poland, and Benjamin made plans to provide career opportunities in the publishing business for Dawid and his sister Eileen, a talented writer who was three years older than her brother. Dawid, having passed his baccalaureate in 1929, was sent to the Staatliche Akademie für Graphische Künste und Buchgewerbe in Leipzig, Germany to study printing technology. Modernist book design and production were characteristic of the curriculum. He graduated in 1931 and returned home to find that economic and political conditions in Poland were deteriorating. Admission to the Sorbonne brought him to Paris to study chemistry and physics from 1932 to 1935. Concerned about draining family resources, he sought work in 1933 from David Rappaport, a family friend who lived in Paris and owned a picture agency. It was from Rappaport that Dawid borrowed the camera that he used for his first serious photographs. As his work found an audience through magazines and other publications, Seymour began signing his work with the nickname “CHIM” (pronounced shim), a French phonetic abbreviation of his original surname.

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