Seymour Jacobs was born on March 27, 1931 in Brooklyn, New York. He grew up with his mother and two brothers in a small apartment in the predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Brighton Beach. With the ocean just steps away, Seymour spent much of his childhood on the beach tagging along with his mother Sadie as she swam and socialized. Sadie had known extreme hardship in her childhood, having been forced to drop out of elementary school to work in a factory at the age of ten. Shortly after Seymour was born, she filed for divorce and was faced with the challenge of raising three boys on her own. As the “cute baby” of the family, it was Seymour’s obligation to have lunch with his father each month and charm him into turning over the alimony check, which was the family’s only source of income. It was on one of these visits, in celebration of Seymour’s fourteenth birthday, that his father presented him with his first camera. It was a gift that would forever change his life.

Sadie Weiser Jacobs, Brighton Beach, 1979

Seymour’s childhood mentor was his older brother Teddy. Handsome, well-read, fluent in seven languages, and a high school handball champion, Teddy was determined to escape the Brighton Beach “ghetto” and live an intellectual life. In 1952, with Teddy’s encouragement, Seymour traveled to Paris to study at the Sorbonne, but shortly after arriving, he contracted tuberculosis from the family he was boarding with, and was forced to move to a sanitorium in the French countryside. Tragically, all of the members of his host family died of the disease. Seymour remained bedridden and isolated in the sanitorium for two years, and it was during this time that he began voraciously reading French literature, and developed what would become a life-long passion for French language and culture.

Seymour returned to New York City and completed degrees in American History and Greek Civilization at Brooklyn College in 1956. He went to graduate school at New York University for French Literature, and worked briefly as a printer before becoming a full time New York City public school French teacher. Seymour’s love of photography blossomed, and he began to devote himself to honing his skills in and out of the darkroom.

Seymour’s interest in photography was profoundly impacted by his friendship with the renowned photographer and teacher, Lisette Model. In the late 1960’s, Seymour studied photography with Model at The New School of Social Research, and was introduced to her student and friend, Diane Arbus. Deeply inspired by the work of both women, and Model’s philosophy that a photograph must reveal something about the photographer as well as the subject, Seymour began to photograph the aging Jewish bathers and handball players of Brighton Beach. His portraits were intimate and sometimes jarring, but they were deeply personal, and reflected his own interior landscape and family history. The Brighton Beach project lasted nearly 20 years, and has since been exhibited around the world.

Rarely leaving home without a camera, Seymour preferred to photograph people as they presented themselves in public spaces. He enjoyed conversation, and built a personal rapport with his subjects, which included bathers, body-builders, shoppers, gamblers, dancehall patrons, and circus performers. He explored the landscapes of Brooklyn, from the tombstones of Jewish immigrant to abandoned industrial buildings. Enthralled by the sprawling beauty of the American West, Seymour took several cross country road-trips throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s photographing the deserts and vistas of Utah, New Mexico, Idaho, and California. At home, he photographed his family almost daily.

Throughout his life, Seymour fought for individual, religious, and artistic freedom. In college, he took a defiant stand against McCarthyism and the blacklisting of artists by seeking out a leadership position in the campus communist party. As a public school teacher, he became the centerpiece of a landmark 1967 lawsuit by refusing to pledge allegiance to the flag in his classroom at the height of the Vietnam War. Later, backed by the ACLU, he headed up a court battle against Atlantic City casino mobsters who sought to ban him from photographing their patrons on the public boardwalk. Rather than turn over his camera to the casino authorities, he spent several days in jail.

Upon moving to Paris in the 1980’s, Seymour’s work gained wider acclaim and he exhibited regularly throughout Europe including shows at Galerie Agathe Gaillard, The Texbraun Gallery, Michele Chomette Gallery and the Musée de la Photographie in Charleroi, Belgium. In 1994, L’Espace Photographique de Paris hosted a retrospective of Seymour’s work, curated by renowned museum director Jean-Luc Monterosso. Several museums and galleries acquired his photographs, including collections at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Musėe de la Photographie, Charleroi, Maison Pour Tous de Calais and La Maison Européenne de la Photographie. Seymour continued to photograph in Paris, and while there he created a series of unsettling nudes, including a series with Isabelle Mège. His portraits of dancer Laura Vignard were described by Michel Guerrin of Le Monde newspaper as “disturbing”.

Seymour died unexpectedly in his sleep in 1999 at the age of 67. Posthumous exhibitions have taken place in Belgium, Brazil and France. In 2016, The New Yorker Magazine featured one of his photographs of Isabelle Mège in the article, “The Opposite of a Muse”, and in 2018, the Mège portraits were exhibited at France’s La Chapelle Contemporary Art Museum. Six of Seymour’s Flatbush Terrace Dancehall images are exhibited in the group show “Fil Noir” (Film Noir) running through the summer of 2019 at La Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris.

Obituaries:

Liberation, February 19, 1999

Seymour Jacobs Dies

The Photographer and Moralist was 67

He had a false casualness, a velvety gaze and the baritone of a crooner — a vision of machismo. While others were being admitted to mental institutions or heading off for the front lines, he decided to spend his seemingly endless stretch of sunny days on Brighton Beach (near Coney Island). His photographs seem to be straight out of 1950’s television, a look later recalled by Cassavetes, Waters, and Lynch. They reminded you right away of Diane Arbus and of retired, burned out, trashy starlets with their weightlifter bodies. It was this ability to boldly reveal the absurd triumph of inflated muscles coupled with the haggard look of withered flesh that seemed to be the key to this moralist’s paradoxical and ferocious work. “Suffering comes merely from the inability to accept oneself,” he stated while scanning the retrospective devoted to his work by the City of Paris in 1994.

Seymour Jacobs was born in Brooklyn on March 27, 1931 and spent some time in France in the early fifties. He even majored in French literature, which he would later teach. He came out against McCarthyism and later, he was brought to trial for refusing to salute the American flag during the height of the Vietnam War. Since 1983 and his Parisian exile, he turned his back on his beach snapshots, “the chaos of tragic women and ridiculous men.” He devoted himself instead to the troubling nature of “complex nudes, which brought out in me a strange ability to penetrate in others motivations often hard to discern and a distress which was completely my own.”

Making frequent reference to the moral generosity of Stendhal and Proust, he did not understand how some could view his photos as cruel or contemptuous. His response was: “Only the weak see my work as cruel, frivolity and the lack of generosity don’t interest me.” The man who regarded youth with indifference (“it holds no magic, and the body has so little importance”) died in Paris at the age of 67.

—Eric Dahan

Le Monde, February 19, 1999

Seymour Jacobs

Photographer of American Beaches

The American photographer Seymour Jacobs died on Sunday, February 14 in Paris at the age of sixty-seven.

This Brooklyn Jew with the look of a crooner was probably better known in France than in the United States, having lived in Paris for the past 25 years. Ironically, however, it was in working with a typically American subject that he earned his reputation as a photographer: New York’s Brighton Beach. For more than 20 years, Seymour Jacobs photographed the beach with both humor and cruelty. His method was unsparing. He would invite young men and women who were more often lower class than well to do, and smug as they were pitiful, to expose their faces, bodies, tans, bathing suits, muscles, mascara, cellulite and pecs. “The beach was part of me like my skin. But unlike me, the beach always managed to stay young,” Jacobs said.

For him, Brighton Beach was the ideal place for flirting and seduction, a place to observe the evolution of social codes, mentalities and attitudes of a country that went from the romantic idealism of the sixties to the self-gratification of the Reagan years.

Seymour Jacobs led several lives. He was a French teacher in New York, taking his early retirement in 1980. He was a liberal activist who demonstrated against the McCarthyism of the 1950’s, and went on to win his case against the City of New York in 1967 for refusing to salute the American flag during the Vietnam war.

He was a photographer who, in 1968, studied at the New School in New York with Lisette Model. And finally, he was an American in France whose art was exhibited in 1994 at the Espace Photographique of Paris, only to have his raw and disturbing nudes shown the following year at the Agathe Gaillard Gallery.

—Michel Guerrin

Biography

Seymour Jacobs (1931-1999)