attack on the Palace of Justice, home to theSupreme Court, in 1985. And after sevenfailed bomb attacks on Escobar’s declaredenemy – the head of the secret police – abus loaded with explosives was driven intothe police headquarters: 89 people werekilled and 500 injured.

Arguably, Mollison’s signal achieve-ment in marshalling this material is hispreservation of the integrity and coherenceof the archival collections with which heworked. Memory is structured so as topresent them intact and with some of theiroriginal context. As a result, the docu-ments and pictures are augmented by anadded dimension that lays bare theirformer existence. The photographs fromthe files of El Espectador, for instance, arereproduced here with the crop marks andsizing instructions left by previous artdirectors and picture editors. Scrutiny ofthe scribbled annotations can be revealing– a mug shot of a murdered police chief(presumably the only picture issued by hisemployers) appears to have been publishedat least ten times by the paper.

The police files, less dog-eared, appear tohave been treated with a little more respect:many feature the official stamps of thedepartments that collated them and most areaccompanied by detailed typed captions.Seized items are photographed alongsiderulers for forensic purposes. Crime scenes,arrest mug shots, victims and ill-gottengains are enumerated and catalogued.

By contrast, the pictures by Escobar’sschoolmate, Edgar Jimenez, or El Chino,are intimate and relaxed. Here is Escobarthe doting parent, helping to blow out thecandles on his son’s birthday cake, orlifting his daughter onto a newly purchasedwhite horse. Elsewhere he dances sedatelywith his wife. Even the photographs ofEscobar’s inner circle as they pose by apoolside seem utterly benign. The imagethat testifies most powerfully to the trustplaced in El Chino, and the unparalleledaccess he enjoyed, is a picture of the drugbaron tucked up in bed, sleeping off theexertions of a birthday celebration.

Mollison’s use of archival photography,in a way that makes evident its originalcontext and functions, suggests its active,instrumental role in the biography heconstructs. These pictures are not mereillustrations to a history that unfoldsbeyond them; they are partial, implicateddocuments. El Chino, for example, tellshow his services as a photographer were indemand, for more than just informalfamily album pictures, during the murder-ous gang war with the rival Cali carte. ‘ElPoeta [an adviser to Escobar] would sendme photos of the Cali guys. I would be toldto repeat the photo one hundred times andthey would be handed out among the lads’.

Photography’s evidential authoritymade it a potent force in such circum-stances and Escobar took pains to limitthe amount of documentary material thatcould be used to incriminate him. Whenthe M-19 group attacked the Palace ofJustice they headed straight for the fourthfloor where the extradition files were held.

And Escobar himself paid for the destruc-tion of the archive of Medellin’s principaldaily paper, El Colombiano.

The Memory of Pablo Escobar deservesrecognition not only as an engrossingaccount of a life of murderous excess butalso as a – consummately designed andprinted – study of the varied functions,languages and powers of photographs.

guy lane

Freelance picture editor

DAVID SEYMOUR (CHIM)

tom beck

Phaidon d14.95 $24.95110 pp. 55 duotone illus.isbn 0714842761

Born in Warsaw (which was then apart of Russia), David Szymin (1911–56) was an innovative photojourn-

alist whose photographs seemed to con-centrate on three main topics: children,artists, and war. He remains knownworldwide under his Americanised name– David Seymour – or simply under thenickname that he forged in order to allowpeople to pronounce correctly his realfamily name (‘Chim’), a pseudonym whichsoon became his own artistic signature.He is also remembered as one of the fourco-founders of the famous Magnum photoagency, with his friends Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and George Rod-ger, in 1947. Seymour was a cosmopolitanartist who spoke five languages and livedin Warsaw, Minsk, Berlin, Paris and NewYork, and often travelled from Europe toNorth America, and then back to England,Greece and Israel. He became a US citizenin 1943. David Seymour even has an entryof his own in the Encyclopaedia of Twentieth-Century Photography (Routledge 2006).

Tom Beck’s excellent monographshows all aspects of Seymour’s work ina chronological progression: his earlyphotographs from 1933 while he wasliving in Paris and attending to populardemonstrations such as the leftist move-ment ‘Front populaire’, and his famousphotographs of Republican volunteerstaken during the Spanish Civil War in1937. We also see his reportage from theaftermath the Second World War, showingGermany in ruins; everyday life during thebirth of Israel; and the tragic 1956 Suezcrisis in which Seymour was shot to deathby an Egytian partisan after the ceasefire.He was only 45.

PabloEscobar andhis wife,Victoria Henao,early1980s.r JamesMollison/Chris Boot Ltd.FromTheMemoryof PabloEscobar byJamesMollison.

68 The Art Book volume 15 issue 3 august 2008 r 2008 the authors. journal compilation r 2008 bpl/aah

Photography

An intuitive master of the image com-position, David Seymour’s photographsoften showed the other side of things: thepoor, the worker, the handicapped, the left-behind. Many photographs reproducedhere are taken from his UNESCO projecton children of the world, 1948–9. Finally,there are also a dozen photographs (someof these are in colour) of celebrities, takenin the 1950s, such as seductress JoanCollins, the young Gina Lollobrigida, IngridBergman, Sophia Loren, Audrey Hepburn,Kirk Douglas, as well as the ageing WinstonChurchill. The book’s cover shows the arthistorian Bernard Berenson, contemplatinga white marble statue of a beautifulreclining woman in an art gallery.

Sometimes, Seymour’s images havecaptured rare moments: the Parisian Palaisde Chaillot facing the Eiffel Tower, in1933, with a central building that wasdestroyed just a few years later; PabloPicasso, posing in front of his Guernica in1937, the year it was made; an earthquakein Greece. Despite the fact that he wasoften sent to the front, Seymour alwaystried to show the human dimension ofwar, and did not show actual combat.

Tom Beck’s accurate comments forevery photograph are concise (about tenlines each); in the first 12 pages, hisintroduction gives some biographical ele-ments and highlights the technical dimen-sions of David Seymour’s art: his use of theminiature Leica camera, and his influenceon other artists, such as Cartier-Bresson, ofcourse, but also Burt Glinn. Beck alsoexplains that Seymour worked as a free-lance photojournalist for countless maga-zines, such as Regards, This Week and Life,although we do not always know for certainfor whom each photograph was made.

A French version of this medium-sizedbook was simultaneously issued by Phai-don under the same title, with an identicalcover, the same format, at a similar price(with the ISBN 0714858072); the Frenchtranslation was successfully made byJacques Guiod, becoming the first bookdedicated to David Seymour ever pub-lished in France. Writings on DavidSeymour are always hard to find; for themoment, this remains the only title on thisphotographer to be available in book-stores, either in French or in English.Before this one, the most recent referencebook available on this artist was thecomprehensive Chim: The Photographs ofDavid Seymour, edited by Inge Bondi (Little,Brown & Company 1996, now out of print).

In only 100 pages or so, Tom Beck’sDavid Seymour (Chim) presents some superbphotographs from various weekly maga-zines, which were meant to depict con-temporary reality. These images were alsorecognised for their aesthetic qualities; theyrapidly became seen as true works of visualart as well as moving historical documents.David Seymour’s images show how dailynews can enter into the making of history,and how art and culture can be interlinked.Although he had a short career of only25 years, David Seymour is still one of themost important photographers of thetwentieth century, and in my view the mostsensitive of all. There is beauty in justabout every photograph he made, andthere are not many artists about whom Icould express such an observation nowa-days. Because of the high quality of the full-page photographs that are reproduced here,this book does justice to Seymour’s im-mense talent.

yves laberge

Freelance book critic, Quebec City

AMERICA IN SPACE – NASA’S FIRST

FIFTY YEARS

steven j dick et al.

Harry N Abrams, New York d25.95 $50.00352 pp. Over 400 illus.isbn 9780810993730

Since autumn 2007 the NationalAeronautics and Space Administra-tion (NASA) has been marking its

first 50 years of scientific and technologi-cal progress. Over the past five decades,NASA has been responsible for some ofthe most enduring icons of manned andunmanned space travel, and as part of itsyear-long celebration it has teamed upwith Abrams to publish the official visualhistory of those achievements.

Illustrated with more than 400 capti-vating and evocative images from theextensive NASA archives, many of themrare and unpublished, and written and

‘The launchof Friendship 7’.Courtesy NASA.FromAmerica inSpace -- NASA’sFirst FiftyYears byStevenJDicket al.

r 2008 the authors. journal compilation r 2008 bpl/aah volume 15 issue 3 august 2008 The Art Book 69

Photography