Max Yavno

The recorded working language is English. Work by Max Yavno is recorded in the collections of Minneapolis Institute of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, National Gallery of Canada and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Distinctions recorded are Guggenheim Fellowship.

• Name — Max Yavno • Born — 26 April 1911 • Birthplace — New York City, U.S. • Died — 4 April 1985 • Place of death — Los Angeles, California, U.S. • Education — * City College of New York • Columbia University • Known for — Street photography, urban landscape photography • Awards — Guggenheim Fellowship (1951)

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.

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.

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." In 1967, Yavno's photograph of a Greyhound bus was commissioned by artist Mason Williams for a life-sized screenprint titled Bus. The photograph was enlarged and printed on 16 pieces of billboard paper; the finished work measured approximately 10 x. Bus was published in an edition of 200, toured the country, and was shown at venues including MoMA and Radio City Music Hall.

Yavno was married to Annie Abramsky in 1930 at age 19 and divorced three years later. He died in Los Angeles on April 4, 1985, of complications resulting from a fall in a shower.