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CHIM: A web biography of David Seymour | |
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Cornell Capa, photographer, author and editor is the younger brother of Robert Capa and a was a member of the staff of Life Magazine from 1946 to 1954. He is the Founding Director of the International Center of Photography (ICP) and the editor of many major photographic exhibitions and publications. Awards to Mr. Capa include membership in the ASMP honor roll in 1975 for "great and lasting contributions made to photography", and the 1978 New York City Mayor's Award of Honor for Arts & Culture: "With the sure eye and conviction of the master photographer, he has given his art form a home, and fixed it as one of the essential expression of our time." His most memorable picture stories include: |
| 1952-1956 Adlai E. Stevenson's Political Career |
| South American People --Guatemala, Venezuela, Equador, Peru |
| Farewell to Eden published by Harper and Row, 1964 with text by Mathew Huxley |
| Russian Orthodox Church |
| Boris Pasternak |
| Moscow Ballet School |
| President John Kennedy |
| Robert Kennedy |
| Israel 1967 and 1974 |
In 1966 Cornell Capa founded the International Fund for Concerned Photography whose goals were to encourage and assist photographers, uncovering and preserving forgotten archives and presenting such work to the public. In 1974, these goals were incorporated into the structure of the International Center of Photography. Cornell Capa recalls Chim in this way:
For a quarter of a century, David Seymour, more familiarly known as "Chim", has been a valued part of my personal and professional life. He was a man who translated his deep human concerns into lasting images that have become an important photographic record of the period from the 1930s to his sudden death in 1956.
Chim was a deeply cultured, well-read, highly intelligent, and very private person. The emotions that were bottled up in him poured out in his images of the Spanish Civil War; war-ravaged children; the living rituals of religion; and the establishment of Israel. At that time, in 1948, he wrote to his sister Eileen Shneiderman: "It was like coming home again. It was like picking up the threads of my life, for which I had been searching in vain on the heaps of rubble and ash in the ruins of Warsaw."
Together with his friends and colleagues, the late Werner Bischof and Robert Capa, he evolved the founding principle that eventually led to the creation of the International Center of Photography (ICP).
