Background
He was born in a poor bookbinder's family in 1893 in the small town of Velizh. He soon moved to Vilno where he enrolled in the art school.
He was born in a poor bookbinder's family in 1893 in the small town of Velizh. He soon moved to Vilno where he enrolled in the art school.
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 Revolutinary Committee. He became the director and taught draftsmanship to Uzbek children studying at the school. In 1921 his life changed dramatically when he obtained a camera. He 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. Penson's images were widely circulated by the Soviet news agency TASS. In 1937 Penson participated in the World Exhibition in Paris winning the Grand Prix Award for Uzbek Madonna, a portrait of a young Uzbek woman, publicly nursing her child.
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.
A great number of Penson's works are housed in the Moscow House of Photography.
