David Seymour

“‘All you need,’ he once said as a noted photographer orated on the psychology behind one of his pictures, ‘is a little bit of luck and enough muscle to click the shutter.’ He might have added: a good eye, a heart and a knowing nose for news. For all of these were obvious in his work.” (Judith Fried)

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. David Rappaport, a family friend who owned the pioneering picture agency Rap, lent him a camera. One of Szymin’s first stories, about night workers, was influenced by Brassaï’s Paris de Nuit (1932). Szymin – or ‘Chim’ – began working as a freelance photographer. From 1934, his picture stories appeared regularly in Paris-Soir and Regards.