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Max Yavno (1911–1985) was a photographer who specialized in street scenes, especially in Los Angeles and San Francisco, California.
For financial reasons he worked as a commercial advertising photographer for the next twenty years (1954–75), creating finely crafted 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.
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. Jack Jones, "Max Yavno, Who Captured L.A. in His Photographs, Dies at 73," Los Angeles Times, April 6, 1985
His noted photograph of a crowd watching "sun-worshipping body builders at Muscle Beach" 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." His obituary in the Los Angeles Times said that:
Photographer Edward Steichen selected twenty of Yavno's prints for the permanent collection at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1950, and the next year Yavno won a Guggenheim fellowship.
Yavno's work was featured in a 2025 San Diego Museum of Art exhibition " John Gutmann & Max Yavno: California Photographers." His work is in the Museum's permanent collection.
Melrose Avenue photo gallery owner G. Ray Hawkins, who represented Yavno and exhibited his works, called him a "social documentarian" and noted that he had "a very special ability for combining composition and content while capturing his social vignettes."
Books
Yavno's photographs accompanied text by newspaper columnists Herb Caen for The San Francisco Book in 1948 and Lee Shippey for The Los Angeles Book in 1950, both published by Houghton-Mifflin.
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