Max Yavno

Max Yavno is born in New York City in 1911, to Russian immigrant parents. Working for the Works Progress Administration, he photographs the city for theater set design, and in the late 1930s he joins the Photo League, serving as its president from 1938 to 1939.

After teaching film and photography in the Army Air Force during the Second World War, he moves west. His two city books, The San Francisco Book with Herb Caen in 1948 and The Los Angeles Book with Lee Shippey in 1950, chronicle the streets of both cities and the people who fill them.

From 1954 to 1975 he runs a commercial photography studio. In the mid-1970s he returns to his own work, photographing Los Angeles, Jerusalem, and Cairo.

In 1981 the University of California Press publishes The Photography of Max Yavno, with a text by Ben Maddow, gathering some eighty-five photographs of the streets and people of Cairo, Jerusalem, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, made from 1938 on.