Newsweek

Covering battles is a dangerous, often desperate, business. There was no more tragic evidence of this than what happened last week in the Middle East.

David Seymour, 44, president of Magnum Photos and one of the world's great photographer-journalists, was killed by Egyptian gunfire, while trying to cross the lines south of Port Said. As often in the past, he was working on a Newsweek assignment.

David Seymour was in the highest sense of the word an international citizen. Born in Poland (his nickname "Chim" was a contraction of his family name "Chimin"), he had been educated at Leipzig and at the Sorbonne. In the pell-mell Europe of the '30s he became a journalist, thus capitalizing on a curiosity that was as insatiable as it was polite. With the great photographer Robert Capa, Chim got his first taste of violence covering the Spanish civil war. He found more of it in the days of Hitler's rise to power. His parents were killed by Nazis in Warsaw.

Chim came to America, going back to Europe later as a wartime U.S. Army photo intelligence officer. Shortly after the war, he helped found Magnum, the international cooperative picture agency. His work became famous as a rare journalistic combination of news sense and reflection.

He specialized in capturing the faces and feelings of some of the world's most uncapturable personalities. His studies of Arturo Toscanini, the art critic Bernard Berenson, Queen Frederika of Greece, and Archbishop Giovanni Montini of Milan --the last a Newsweek cover -- were classics. A book he did on Europe's postwar children remains one of the most arresting essays of modern photography.

Although living in Rome, Chim continually tripped back to the U.S. A man who spoke five languages with ingratiatingly ungrammatical fluency, his international hospitality was legendary, as was his unwearied idealism.

He was killed in Egypt, just two years after his friend Bob Capa was killed in Indo-China. Newsweek's Paris bureau chief, Benjamin Bradlee, with Chim just before he died, wrote this of his life and work:

"He was a real artist, this sweet little owl of a man. Where other photographers slammed their jeep up to a scene and snapped the picture from their seats, Chim was always drifting into the middle of things, endlessly trying to get the perfect frame and the perfect background for the otherwise sensational picture.

"Few jounalists alive had the respect he enjoyed. He was a real artist, a real friend."