Spanning Europe from 1933 to 1956, We Went Back gathers Chim’s photography across a period shaped by antifascist struggle, civil war, mass displacement and postwar reconstruction. Published by Prestel in 2013, the 304-page volume approaches these decades through the career of a photojournalist who was not merely recording events, but attending closely to the political, social and cultural life surrounding them.

Born Dawid Szymin in Warsaw, Chim began photographing for leftist magazines in Paris in the early 1930s. In 1936, Regards sent him to cover the Spanish Civil War alongside Robert Capa and Gerda Taro; he later became a cofounder of Magnum Photos. War repeatedly forms the setting of this work, yet it does not exhaust its meaning. The book also encompasses ordinary social experience, cultural life and the difficult rebuilding of countries damaged by World War II.

Chim’s own history of dislocation and familial loss gives particular weight to his postwar photographs of child refugees. Their force lies in an empathy that avoids turning suffering into abstraction. At the same time, his reportorial attention is joined to a refined sense of composition: historical evidence and formal poise occupy the same frame. This combination distinguishes Chim’s practice from a narrowly event-driven account of twentieth-century Europe.

For collectors concerned with documentary photography, Magnum and the visual history of Europe, We Went Back offers a substantial monographic framework for understanding Chim’s achievement. Its significance rests less on any single celebrated image than on the breadth of the period assembled: from the emergence of antifascist politics through war and its aftermath. The result places an intellectually engaged photographer within the history he witnessed, while making clear how grace, observation and human sympathy could coexist in photojournalism.