Max Yavno

Max Yavno (April 26, 1911 – April 4, 1985) was a photographer who specialized in street scenes, especially in Los Angeles and San Francisco, California.

Early life The son of Russian immigrants, Louis and "Lizzie" (Rudnick) Yavno, Max was born in New York City on April 26, 1911. He had a brother, Emil, and a sister, Ethel.

Career

Early career and WPA work Yavno worked as a Wall Street messenger while attending City College of New York at night. He attended the graduate school of political economics at Columbia University and worked in the Stock Exchange before becoming a social worker in 1935. He did photography for the Works Progress Administration from 1936 to 1942. He was president of the Photo League in 1938 and 1939. Yavno was in the U.S. Army Air Corps from 1942 to 1945, after which he moved to San Francisco and began specializing in urban-landscape photography.

Commercial photography History professor Constance B. Schulz said of Yavno, "For financial reasons, he worked as a commercial advertising photographer for the next twenty years (1954–75), creating finely crafted still lifes that appeared in Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. He returned to artistic landscape photography in the 1970s, when his introspective approach found a more appreciative audience. Funding from the National Endowment for the Arts enabled him to travel to Egypt and Israel in 1979."

Subjects and notable works He also captured a pre-Dodgers Chavez Ravine, a giant plaster leg on top of a building in West Los Angeles and a "nostalgic" shot of a cable car being turned around at Powell and Market streets in San Francisco.

His noted photograph of a crowd watching "sun-worshipping body builders at Muscle Beach in Venice" sold at auction in 1984 for almost $4,000. He said he had spent three Sundays at the beach before the subjects "stopped flexing for his camera and resumed posing for each other." Bus was published in an edition of 200, toured the country, and was shown at venues including MoMA and Radio City Music Hall. His work is in the museum's permanent collection.

Books Yavno's photographs accompanied text by newspaper columnists in two books: