Los Angeles Modern Auctions (LAMA)

Born in New York to Russian immigrants, Max Yavno would become known for his works of documentary photography. Yavno studied at City College of New York and attended graduate school at Columbia University before working in the Stock Exchange. In 1935, Yavno became a social worker and would take photographs for the Works Progress Administration from 1936 to 1942. It was during this period that he joined New York’s Photo League and became the organization’s president in the late 1930s. Yavno served in the U.S. military from 1942 to 1945, relocating to San Francisco when the war ended.

In California, Yavno continued to hone his eye and earn recognition as a social documentarian, supporting himself through teaching and creating work as a freelancer for publications including Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. He was included in the 1947 exhibition Seventeen American Photographers at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where his photographs were shown alongside works by Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, Man Ray, and Edward Weston. By the early 1950s, Edward Steichen had purchased many of Yavno’s prints for the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and, in 1953, Yavno was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship.

From 1954 to 1975, Yavno operated his own commercial photography business in Los Angeles, a city where he made many of his celebrated images. Among these, Yavno captured the city’s Chavez Ravine before the displacement of its community for Dodger Stadium and bodybuilders of Venice Beach; Muscle Beach, 1949 took the photographer three days and seventy exposures to craft.

Today, Yavno’s works are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the National Gallery of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others.