Yavno, Max (1911-85), American photographer. Born in New York, he studied business administration and worked on the Stock Exchange before becoming a social worker in 1935. He did documentary social photography for the Works Progress Administration from 1936 to 1942, in the meantime joining the Photo League in New York and serving as its president in 1938-9, and rooming with Aaron Siskind 1939-42. He served in the US air force 1942-5. After the war he moved to San Francisco, where he worked with a view camera (see field camera) as an urban landscape photographer, producing for Houghton Mifflin The San Francisco Book (1948) with Herb Caen and The Los Angeles Book (1950) with Lee Shippey. 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.
— Constance B. Schulz
Bibliography
- The Photography of Max Yavno, introd. B. Maddow (1981)
