Max Penson

Max Penson
Photo credit:Max Penson
Born	1893 Velizh, Vitebsk Governorate, Russian Empire (present-day Smolensk Oblast, Russia)
Died	1959
Nationality	Russian, Soviet
Occupation	Photojournalist, Photographer and artist
Website	http://maxpenson.com/en/

Max Penson (1893–1959) was a noted Russian photojournalist and photographer of the Soviet Union noted for his photographs of Uzbekistan. His photographs documented the economic transformation of Uzbekistan from a highly traditional feudal society into a modern Soviet republic between 1920 and 1940. Max Penson is one of the most prominent representatives of the Uzbek photography.

He was born into a poor bookbinder's Jewish family in 1893 in the small town of Velizh in Vitebsk Governorate (present-day Smolensk Oblast, Russia). He soon moved to Vilno where he enrolled in the art school of S. N. Yuzhanin. In 1914, he was forced as a Jew to move with his family to Kokand in Turkestan.

After the 1917 Russian Revolution he founded an art school in Kokand under administration of the Kokand Revolutionary Committee. He became the director and taught draftsmanship to 350 Uzbek children studying at the school. In 1921 his life changed dramatically when he obtained a camera. He would go on to become one of Uzbekistan's and indeed the Soviet Union's prominent professional photographers in the period 1920-1940, capturing its people and economic progression and made over 30,000 photographs by 1940.

He moved to the Uzbek capital of Tashkent and from 1926 through to 1949 worked for the largest newspaper in Central Asia, the Pravda Vostoka (Truth of the East). During the 1930s he was particularly prolific in capturing the public engineering works in Uzbekistan and the industrialization of the cotton trade in the country. Penson's images were widely circulated by the Soviet news agency TASS and in 1933 his photographs featured in an extensive volume exploring economic progression in the Soviet Union entitled, USSR: Under Construction.