Max Penson

Born in 1893 in the small town of Velizh, in what is now Belorussia, in a poor family, he learned to read and write by himself. From 1907 to 1911 he attended the Velizh Public School and later the School of Ceramic Arts in Mirgorod, in the Province of Poltava. His poor means led him to leave school and move to Vilno where he managed to be accepted to the Antokolski Foundation’s School of Applied Arts. In 1915 the artist fled his hometown of Velizh in Belorussia during the Russian pogroms and World War II, to settle in Kokand in Central Asia, where he made a living as an accountant and a drawing teacher until 1917. Director of the Applied Arts Laboratories in Kokand for the following five years, his life as a painter and artist changed dramatically when he received a camera as a present from the District of Kokand. In 1923 he moved to Tachkent in Uzbekistan and started to join photographers directing professional studios. Inclined to photo reportage, from 1926 to 1948 Penson worked as a professional photographer for the newspaper Pravda Vostoka (the Truth of the East) and from 1940 to 1945 he worked for the Red Army. His only solo exhibition is dated 1939 for the 15th Anniversary of the Uzbek Soviet Republic, and his more than 300 stills were collected and published in a catalogue by his friend Alexandre Rodtchenko. In 1940, admiring his extraordinary work Sergei Eisenstein wrote : «It is virtually impossible to speak about the city of Fergana without mentioning the omnipresent Penson who traveled all over Uzbekistan with his camera. His unparalleled photo archives contain material that enables us to trace a period in the republic’s history, year by year and page by page. His whole artistic development, his whole destiny, was tied up with this wonderful republic». Max Penson’s work is composed of thousands of negative films and original plates; unfortunately, most of these have been destroyed or deteriorated because badly preserved.