Severin was wide-ranging and adaptable, photographing subjects in combat and in jungle settings, but also comfortable covering stories on the elite students and staff of Harvard Law School[6] and the ‘coming out’ of a cotton magnate's daughter[7] An inveterate adventurer, he professed that "I don't know fear.
It is one thing I am not acquainted with.”’[8] He photographed the coffee port of Santos in Brazil in 1930; the Chaco War 1932-35, showing combat with light Swiss and Czechoslavakian-made weapons,[9] and Bolivian men leaving their home town by farm truck after being drafted in to their national army for combat against Paraguay; 'coca-chewing Andean Indians';[10] the ’Auslandsdeutsche' of Tovar a Baden village in Venezuela (1934); extraction of rubber in Guatemala 1935 and its transport by Chicleros of the rainforest of northern Guatemala over the Lago Peten Itza to Flores where the gum was processed; a locust plague in Uruguay 1936; a feature on Ralph Cook Craig, winner of the sprint double at the 1912 Summer Olympics, in his office in Albany, for Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung’s special edition on the Olympics (1936); the river port of Barranquilla at the Rio Magdalena (1938); and on piranhas (1937).
Other stories covered Marajó Island in Brazil and its cowboys; Peruvian workers demonstrating how the ancient Incas polished the large surfaces of their stone buildings, by hauling a rough boulder back and forth across the rock face; Panama (1945) and another feature on the “Architecture of the Prehistoric Civilization of the Andes in South America” with details of masonry; and a matador getting dressed with the help of an assistant (1945).
In the 1950s Severin illustrated, and also often wrote, general interest and travel stories and on ethnographic and political subjects; on Pan American Grace Airways aircraft; the rarely witnessed puberty ceremony for a San Bias girl of the Cuna Indians;[12][13] children 'rescued from Castro' by a Catholic welfare organisation at a refugee camp south of Miami waiting for resettlement in other cities; workers in Curaçao making hats, one of the island's main trades; a New Orleans marching band playing in the street during a carnival pageant in Louisiana; Costa Rican churchgoers; the city of Arequipa in southern Peru; Naomi, the dancer at 'The Silver Slippers' club in Cuba; tourists queueing in Moscow's Red Square to enter the Mausoleum of Vladimir Ilich Lenin; marimba making in Guatemala and traditional leather-tooled men's money bags in made in Colombia that were being adopted by American women; and water pots in Colombia.
In the 1960s Severin portrayed Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard in the NASA Control Room and other launch activities in July 1961; documented the civil rights demonstrations with American singer Harry Belafonte addressing crowds at the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington, 1963;[15] and photographed couples dancing the rhumba in a club in Cuba.