TERESKA AND HER PHOTOGRAPHER: A STORY

Carole Naggar

Tereska and her photographer : A story is a photobook  featuring a fictional story by Carole Naggar about the extraordinary parallel lives of Magnum photographer and co-founder David “Chim” Seymour and Tereska Adwentowska, a young Polish girl who was the main subject of one of her most famous photographs.

In September 1948, while on assignment for UNICEF to report on European children, Chim photographed Tereska at an elementary school in Warsaw, Poland. Millions of readers saw Tereska’s photo when it was published in LIFE magazine in December of the same year, and were touched by his fate. During the Wola massacre, she was wounded by shrapnel and her image became emblematic of the fate of children during World War II. In the aftermath of the war, Chim tried to find out her name and her story. However, Chim and Tereska died before seeing each other again. 

Based on historical facts, Tereska and her photographer: A story is a fiction constructed like a little opera, where all the characters in the lives of Chim and Tereska bring their different voices to the narrative. They understand: Tereska, Chim, Tereska’s parents (whose father was a freedom fighter during the Warsaw Uprising), Enrique Meneses, Jr. (a journalist who researched Chim’s and journalist Jean Roy’s death in Egypt) and several others. 

The book presents a non-linear chronology, weaving vignettes of 1948 and the present with those of Chim’s youth and Tereska’s early childhood. David “Chim” Seymour’s photographs, as well as several anonymous historical images, are creatively arranged by award-winning book designer Ricardo Báez with striking typography by Juan Mercerón.