Max Yavno Collection

On the Center for Creative Photography website, I found an artist named Max Yavno who has a collection of gelatin silver prints. The subjects of the photographs vary from people to buildings. The arrangement of the collection is a little confusing, even after examining the box inventory finding aid, but it seems to be separated by location of the subject of the photograph. The finding aid for this collection seems to be box inventory, having very little description aside from box number and titles of the photographs within the boxes. Most photographs have titles and corresponding dates as well as the size of the print. Each photograph also has an item ID number, but the numbers do not follow sequential order. 

In my attempts to search these photographs, I found that I could not search by ID number as it appears in the finding aid. It doesn’t seem to help that the format of the number in the database is different than the numbers in the finding aid. While the numbers in the online database are separated by periods (92.153.4) the numbers in the finding aid are separated by colons (92:153:4). I’m sure it doesn’t make too much of a difference, but it is a small consistency issue that makes it slightly more difficult to search for. You can, however, search as the number appears in the database. That is, using periods instead of colons.

Most pictures have titles and dates, but there is little more information about the photographs than that in the finding aid. The finding aid the ID numbers also do not all follow sequential order, but I am not sure of the order they are placed in. On the website, however, the photographs that are organized alphabetically by title give a full description of the photograph including title, credit line, copyright, medium, image dimensions and negative number. It would be helpful if there was some sort of description explaining further the methods of organization used.

Searching using a key word also produces good results, pulling up relevant titles that include the word (in this case I used the word soccer) although unsurprisingly it also pulled up titles from other artists as well. What surprised me was that this search term also pulled up a photograph under the title ‘Boys Playing Ball and Arch’ where the exact word ‘soccer’ was not found in the title. This leads me to think that this search engine is fairly thorough in what photographs is searches for. Searching the artist’s name Yavno, Max pulls up collection information as well as individual photographs under his name.

Artist Page on Center for Creative Photography

http://www.creativephotography.org/artists/max-yavno

Finding aid:

http://www.creativephotography.org/files/cg-max-yavno.pdf