David Szymin was born in 1911 in Warsaw into a family of publishers that produced works in Yiddish and Hebrew. His family moved to Russia at the outbreak of the First World War, returning to Warsaw in 1919. After studying printing in Leipzig and chemistry and physics at the Sorbonne in the 1930s, Szymin stayed on in Paris.
From 1936 to 1938 Chim photographed the Spanish Civil War, and after it was over, he went to Mexico on an assignment with a group of Spanish Republican émigrés. On the outbreak of the Second World War, he moved to New York, where he adopted the name, David Seymour. Both his parents were killed by the Nazis.
Seymour served in the US Army (1942-45), winning a medal for his work in intelligence. In 1947, along with Cartier-Bresson, Capa, George Rodger, and William Vandivert, he founded Magnum Photos. He was commissioned by UNICEF the following year to photograph Europe’s children in need and went on to photograph major stories across Europe, Hollywood stars on European locations, and the emergence of the State of Israel. He was killed by Egyptian machine-gun fire on November 10 1956, while traveling near the Suez Canal to cover a prisoner exchange.
