By Inge Bondi
Introduction by Henri Cartier-Bresson
Foreword by Cornell Capa

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Indelible among Chim’s most powerful photographs are his tender images of refugee children displaced or maimed by war, part of a three-year project for UNICEF that took him though Europe. Chim’s quiet, owlish charm and emotional empathy extended to his portraits of such diverse figures as Ingrid Bergman, Arturo Toscanini, Bernard Berenson, and Audrey Hepburn. It was a shock to all when he died tragically in a sniper fire in Suez in 1956.

This long-overdue remembrance of the life and times of one of the most memorable chroniclers of the century is introduced by two longtime friends, photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and Cornell Capa, Director Emeritus of the International Center of Photography in New York. A fascinating biographical account by Inge Bondi, former director of Magnum during Chim’s lifetime, CHIM: The Photographs of David Seymour sheds further light upon Chim’s personal life.

About the Authors:

INGE BONDI was born Inge Kuehl in Berlin, in 1925. After spending the war years in England, joining the BBC European Service in 1943, she married Henry S. Bondi in 1947, and immigrated to the U.S. In 1950, she joined Magnum. David Seymour made her Secretary-Treasurer in 1955, and she was then voted in as a shareholder, the only nonphotographer to hold that distinction. She later became Director of Special Projects. Bondi left Magnum in 1970 to write, teach, and lecture on photography. Consulting editor of Print-Letter until 1982, she also contributed articles to Die Weltwoche and Contemporary Photographer and essays to monographs on Ernst Haas and George Rodger. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

CORNELL CAPA was born in Budapest in 1918 and moved to Paris in 1936. He emigrated to New York in 1937 and joined Life in 1938, working as a photographer there from 1946 to 1957. He became president of Magnum from 1956 to 1959. In 1958, he founded the Robert Capa/David Seymour Photographic Foundation in Israel and, in 1966, the International Fund for Concerned Photography in New York. In 1974 he founded and directed (until 1994) the International Center of Photography in New York. Capa is the editor and author of a number of books, including a retrospective of his work published in 1992.

HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON was born in 1908 in France. After studying with André Lhote, spending time with Surrealists, and traveling to the Ivory Coast and Mexico, he began photographing in 1932. During World War II, he was held prisoner in Germany, escaping in 1943. The Museum of Modern Art in New York held his first retrospective exhibition in the U.S. in 1947, the same year he cofounded Magnum. There have been numerous international exhibitions of his work, which has been published in more than 200 books. Since 1972, he has devoted himself to drawing.

CATHERINE CHERMAYEFF, KATHY MCCARVER MNUCHIN, NAN RICHARDSON
Catherine Chermayeff is a former picture editor at Fortune and the former director of Special Projects at Magnum from 1987 to 1991; Kathy McCarver Mnuchin is a a former picture editor at Esquire; and Nan Richardson is a writer and a former editor at Aperture, Random House, and other publishing companies, where she edited more than sixty books.

$35 USD
10.25″ x 11.25″ / 192 pp
Duotone photographs
ISBN: 0-8212-2229-5

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