The event dedicated to David "Chim" Seymour, the famous photographer among the founders of Magnum Photos, set up at the Palazzo Grimani Museum, offers the opportunity to see some of the most significant images of the 20th century in a setting of extraordinary beauty.
The exhibition “David “Chim” Seymour, il Mondo e Venezia 1936-56”, open until 17 March 2024, promoted by the Regional Directorate of Veneto Museums – Palazzo Grimani Museum in collaboration with Suazes and curated by Marco Minuz, tells the legacy of the great photographer through his most important reportages, from France in 1936 to the Spanish civil war, from post-war Europe to the portraits of the illustrious people who made the history of those years.
David Szymin was born in 1911 in Warsaw to a family of Jewish publishers and, after studying printing in Leipzig and chemistry and physics at the Sorbonne, in the 1930s he decided to stay in Paris where David Rappaport, a family friend who owned the Rap photo agency, lends him his first camera which initiates him into a big passion.
All you need is a little bit of luck and enough muscle to click the shutter. He (David Seymour) 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)
From 1936 to 1938 he conducted an important reportage on the Spanish Civil War which introduced him to the world of high international journalism. At the outbreak of the Second World War he moved to New York where he adopted the name David Seymour, keeping the nickname Chim, short for “Szymin”, and from 1942 to 1945 he served in the United States Army, obtaining a medal of merit for his work in the intelligence service.
In 1947, together with Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, George Rodger and William Vandivert, he founded the Magnum Photos agency in New York of which, after Capa’s death in 1954, he became president, until 1956, when, traveling near of the Suez Canal to photograph a prisoner exchange, he is killed by Egyptian machine gun fire.
Among his works, we find some of the images that have made the history of our century, such as the one from 1947 in which he immortalized two children in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin destroyed under the blows of the Second World War, or the portraits of a splendid Sophia Loren in a pin-up version immortalized in her home in 1955 and that of Winston Churchill while sitting in the Strasbourg parliament in 1950.
And then there is Venice, to which a large section of the exhibition is dedicated, in particular the reportage shots that Seymour took in the city in 1950 as part of a larger project dedicated to post-war Europe, including the iconic photograph depicting a gondolier landing at the Esso petrol station on the Grand Canal.
At the end of the exhibition, which can be accessed from the monumental staircase of the Palace after having admired the beautiful hall decorated with the colorful works of the German artist Georg Baselitz created expressly for the Museum, you can also visit the splendid Antiquarium which brings together the important collection of classical statues of the Grimani family, including precious Greek originals.
The Secret
The exhibition also tells one of the mysteries that surrounds the work of David “Chim” Seymour, that of a suitcase where the photographer kept the rolls of photographs taken during the Spanish Civil War together with Robert Capa and Gerda Taro. Seymor lost track of them at the time he had to leave Paris at the outbreak of the Second World War until they reappeared in 1995 among the personal effects of General Francisco Aguilar Gonzalez, the Mexican ambassador to France during the Vichy government.
