Born in Hamburg in 1910 to a French father and a German mother, Eric Schwab spent his childhood between Germany, Switzerland, and France. Drawn to photography, he became an assistant in 1928 and a still photographer in 1929, before working from 1931 to 1937 for women's magazines (Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Vanity Fair, etc.). He published his first report in Romania for Vu and Life in 1939. Drafted in September of that year, he became a correspondent for AFP in October 1944. Thanks to his accreditation with the US Army, he produced war reports in Belgium and Germany. It was in early 1945 that he met American journalist and writer Meyer Levin, with whom he teamed up. They were among the first reporters to discover the Nazi camps and report their horrors to the press. "Meyer Levin is searching for what remains of the Jewish communities," explains Annette Wieviorka in 1945. La Découverte (Seuil, 2015), and Eric Schwab is trying to find his mother, deported to a camp as a Jew. His photos of the concentration camps were widely disseminated internationally and were exhibited very early on, both in the United States and France.
After the Liberation, the photographer left France and settled in New York in 1946, where he continued to be a correspondent for AFP until the early 1950s. He then worked for various international organizations (UN, UNESCO, WHO, FAO, ILO, etc.), focusing on the fate of refugees. Two of his images were selected for the exhibition The Family of Man, curated by Edward Steichen and presented in New York in 1955, before traveling around the world. Alongside his commissioned work, he carried out several personal projects, such as Vanishing Paris, on the transformations of the capital. A subject that his death in 1977 prevented him from completing.
