Stockholm, Sweden; Finnish Museum of Photography,
Helsinki, Finland)
2002 Photography Fast Forward: Aperture at 50; The New
Museum of Contemporary Art; New York
2003 Corpus Christi: Representations of Christ in Photogra-
phy, 1850–2001; International Haus der Photographie—
Deichtorhallen; Hamburg, Germany
Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American
Self; International Center of Photography; New York
Selected Works
Heaven and Hell, 1984
Milk/Blood, 1986
Piss and Blood XIII, 1987
Piss Christ, 1987
Female Bust, 1988
Untitled VII (Ejaculate in Trajectory), 1989
Black Jesus, 1990
Nomads (Bertha), 1990
Klansman (Imperial Wizard), 1990
The Morgue (Knifed to Death I), 1992
The Morgue (Knifed to Death II), 1992
Budapest (Bathhouse), 1994
Native American Portraits: Woman, 1996
The Interpretation of Dreams (Black Santa), 2001
America (Boy Scout John Schneider, Troop 422), 2002Further Reading
Appearance. Galleria d’Arte Moderna Bologna, Edizione
Charta, Milan: Italy, 2000.
Murphy, Patrick.Andres Serrano: Works 1983–1993. Phil-
adelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of
Pennsylvania, 1994.
Serrano, Andres.America and Other Works. Los Angeles
and London: Taschen, 2004.
Wallis, Brian, ed.Andres Serrano: Body and Soul. New
York: Takarajima Books, 1995.
Wallis, Brian, Marianne Weems, and Philip Yenawine, eds.
Art Matters: How the Culture Wars Changed America.
New York: New York University Press, 1999.
Weintraub, Linda. ‘‘Urine: Andres Serrano.’’ InArt on the
Edge and Over. Lichtfield, Connecticut: Art Insights,
Inc., 1996.DAVID ‘‘CHIM’’ SEYMOUR
American, born in Poland
Born Didek Szymin in Warsaw, Poland, then
annexed as part of Czarist Russia, to a middle-
class family on 20 November 1911, photographer
David Seymour invented his nickname ‘‘Chim’’ in
1933, while living in Paris, from the first syllable of
his family name as it should be pronounced in the
Polish language. The elder Szymin owned an impor-
tant publishing house of Hebrew and Yiddish
books in Warsaw. During World War I, the Szymin
family found refuge in Odessa and returned to War-
saw in 1919. The young Didek Szymin grew up in
a Jewish household and went to a Jewish school, the
Gymnasium Ascolah in Warsaw, graduating in
- As he subsequently lived and worked in
many countries, Chim was fluent in Polish, Yiddish,
Russian, and later in German, French, and English.
Didek Szymin first worked toward a career in the
tradition of his father’s profession, learning new tech-
niques about how to produce art books with color
plates at an innovative graphic-arts school in Ger-
many. While in Leipzig (1929–1932), Szymin studied
color printing techniques for the reproduction of
paintings, graduating from the Leipzig Akademie
der Graphischen und Buchkunst in 1931. As the
Nationalist Socialist regime gathered power, Szymin
left Germany for Paris and in September 1932 be-
came a university student in chemistry at the Sor-
bonne. In 1933, he began to take pictures as an extra
job for a family friend, David Rappaport, who
owned a photo agency in Paris, named ‘‘Rap.’’
Through this contact, at 22, Didek Szymin became
friends with photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and
thesameyearmetEndre ́ Friedmann, who would
later become famous under the name Robert Capa.
Szymin’s first professional publication as a free-
lance photoreporter was for a leftist French illus-
trated magazine,Regards, in its fifth weekly issue of
March 2, 1934, publishing under the signature of
‘‘CHIM’’ (in capitals), a pseudonym that he would
use throughout his career. His first photographs
appeared in the newspaperParis Soirand in the
French illustrated magazineVoila`. His first subjects
were urban and modern, often related to social and
political change: street scenes, night workers, strik-SERRANO, ANDRES