Smile And Say Cheese, Children… Maimed By War
Menachem Wecker
Children playing with dolls generally make good photo-ops. They fit well on wall calendars, interspersed amongst images of flowers and colorful birds, to be gazed at while listening to CDs with sounds of the rainforest. But photographer David Seymour photographed a different kind of child: the vulnerable, persecuted sort that frolics not on picturesque jungle gyms but in war zones. Children Playing with Something That Was Once a Doll, Naples (1948) is a perfect example. The children are smiling, as they should be. But their clothes are tattered and the doll with which they are playing has been so deformed that it is unrecognizable as a doll without the help of the photograph title.
The photograph is one of many that Seymour, "Chim" to his friends, captured when he was commissioned by the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) to photograph post-war European children in Poland, Hungary, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Greece and Italy. Several of these photographs appear in the show "Reflections from the Heart: Photographs by David Seymour (Chim)" at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. The other images of Italian children include Children Maimed by War, Villa Savoia, Rome and Young Neapolitans in a Reformatory, Naples.
Chim was born Dawid Szymin in Warsaw, Poland, in 1911 to a Jewish family that published Hebrew and Yiddish books. The Szymin family publishing company published Sholem Asch’s The Shtetl for the first time and translated writers like Mark Twain, Heinrich Heine and Guy de Maupassant into Yiddish. Chim’s parents died in 1942 in a ghetto created by the Nazis in Otwock, Poland.
Chim was in many ways a war photographer. He covered the Front Populaire in France in 1935 and the Spanish Civil war in 1936. In 1943, he was sent to England by the US army, he was a volunteer, to interpret aerial photographs. He even ran with soldiers in Spain in 1938 photographing them with his Leica portable camera. Chim died tragically in 1956 while he was covering a prisoner exchange during the Suez Canal crisis. It happened when Egyptian sniper fire drove his and his partner’s car off the road and into the Suez Canal.
But despite Chim’s tragic death and his photographs of war-struck children, many of the photographs are less somber affairs. Peggy Guggenheim at the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, Venice (1950) shows the celebrity collector sitting on the deck of her Venice home on the Grand Canal. Guggenheim wears enormous gold-rimmed butterfly sunglasses and her four dogs sit around her. The photograph manages to capture a playful Peggy Guggenheim, even though she hides her expression behind her sunglasses.
Pablo Picasso in front of Guernica, Paris (1937) shows Picasso in front of his famous painting in a way that will surprise many viewers who haven’t seen the painting in person. It is much larger in scale than it looks in art books. Picasso, who incidentally told Peggy Guggenheim "Madame, you will find the lingerie department on the second floor" when she showed up in his Paris studio in 1940, attempting to buy her picture a day, stands in the center of the bottom of the photograph. Chim captures the rightmost portion of Guernica, which depicts a man with an overturned head and his hands up in the air. Picasso, who stands directly under the painted man, resembles the painted face with his intense stare and comb-over. As Tom Beck correctly observes in David Seymour (Chim" (Phaidon, 2005), Picasso appears to be more a component of the painting than its creator contemplating his work.
But it is Chim’s pin-ups, like Joan Collins (at 18), London (1951) that are perhaps his most interesting pieces. Joan Collins (at 18), London (1951) portrays the famous British actress and author sitting on a porch overlooking a beach. She wears a sexy red dress and by all accounts ought to be just another pin-up. But two decisions on Chim’s part elevate this photograph to art. Collin sits with her arms and feet configured in a triangular formation. The hands clasp the feet in such a mesmerizing and continuous way that it recalls an MC Escher drawing. The drawing also captures a very human rather than glamorous moment, the way that another subject of Chim’s photography, the late Richard Avedon, managed to capture Marilyn Monroe.
And throughout the children and war, pin-ups and celebrity photos, Chim captures his images with a personal gentle touch that finds humanity and personality both in devastating war and behind the cloudy sunglasses of Peggy Guggenheim.
