“I like to think of Max as the innocent formographer. In a lifetime of devotion to excellence, his passion for the well-made object has moved craft to art, transformed the ordinary to a luminous, ordered presence. Child of the thirties, Max has been rescued from relative obscurity by the connoisseurship and perceptive dealership of the late seventies - to the delight of his fellow photographers and an expanding and appreciative audience.”
~ Aaron Siskind
(1903-1991)
Max was one of the great American photographers of his generation. I first met him when I moved to California in 1979, and he left an immediate impression on me. He was the chronicler of Los Angeles in the same way Berenice Abbott captured New York—revealing the hidden beauty of the city and its quiet, often overlooked corners. From him, I learned not just about the city’s logistics, but how to see its urban landscapes with a poet’s eye.
Over his career, Max received many honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1951, and in 1950, Edward Steichen selected twenty of his photographs for the permanent collection at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Yet despite this recognition, he struggled to make a living from his work, a reality that shadowed much of his life.
His hand-crafted darkroom prints are extraordinary. This particular image, with its stark, “film noir” simplicity, stands out as one of his most powerful. In many ways, it feels like a self-portrait—an expression of his keen observation, his quiet intensity, and the solitude he often carried even while documenting the bustling life of Los Angeles.