Born in Harlem, NYC, then spending his first six months in Brooklyn, Max grew up in the comfortable Five Towns on Long Island, New York. Enduring a pleasant, non-traumatic childhood, he went off to the Midwest to study and received his Bachelor of Landscape Architecture degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

After college and a brief obligatory stint in the US Army, he spent 15 years partaking in Manhattan's 60’s-70’s burgeoning art scene (and the other cultural phenomena of that particular time and venue!). In 1981, despite his irrational fear of earthquakes, he visited his brother in San Francisco and was seduced by its beauty, climate and thriving culture. So he relocated there in November of that same year.

Apart from his art and architectural disciplines, Max also has a literary bent: He’s written screenplays, poems and short essays. He also consumes Netflix, HBO/Max, Amazon Prime, Hulu, movies, good food, extensive world travel and The New York Times crossword puzzle, which he does daily on paper in ink!

His artistic collaboration with Kazu Umeki on BLECHMEKI, created in 2012, has helped in this refocusing of his artistic lens. For many years, Max has taken special point-of-view art photographs. Last year, he renewed that direction, emphasizing and memorializing these photos, as he gleaned previous gems from his photo library.

Max has captured his mind's and eye's artful p.o.v. of the everyday environment and has presented them to the world. Hopefully, the viewer sees the art in these photographs — art that might not ever been apparent — if Max had not captured it with his mind and camera.