When I began to photograph toy soldiers in 1972 . . . German infantrymen . . . that struck a very responsive chord. I photographed the wrapped box, then the box being torn open, then the soldiers standing there on white paper. It was kind of a Dada exercise. I knocked one over to pretend that he was dead.
David Levinthal, in Richard L. Woodward, The Wild West: Photographs by David Levinthal (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 6.
David Levinthal was born in 1949 in San Francisco. He grew up watching television and recalls that most shows in the 1950s were Westerns, producing what the artist describes as a faux history “about a West that never was but will always be.”1 Despite living in the West, John Wayne movies shaped Levinthal’s memory of it—the very images he’d been raised on were not only fake but insidiously coercive, defining and perpetuating pop culture’s narrowly defined ideals and stereotypes. Levinthal uses photography and toys like miniature landscapes, tiny dolls, and model sets to create imaginative worlds that explore the constructed nature of memory through facsimile, both in material and pictorial form.
David Levinthal, Toying with History, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, posted June 6, 2019, video, 5:46 minutes, available at youtube.com/watch?v=ARnKPyvoEL4. ↩︎
One of David Levinthal’s most controversial bodies of work is the series “Blackface” (1995–98). The project began as a reprisal of scenes from D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation in a series of tableaux photographs addressing the minstrelsy of Black stereotypes in popular culture. Levinthal began collecting figurines, like a mammy cookie jar and Black lawn jockeys featuring racist caricatures and soon found himself at antique shows from New Jersey to Washington, DC, struck not only by the volume of Black memorabilia in circulation, but also their production date range, from the late 1800s through the early 1990s.1 “Toys are not benign objects,” says Levinthal, “but representations of the culture from which they came.”2 Rather than a filmic remake, he photographed the figures individually, creating 221 lustrous portraits against black velvet—iconoclastic, but nonetheless lush, complex images.
David Levinthal, “History, Memory, and Myth,” lecture at Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts, April 25, 2018 (posted May 15, 2018), video, 1:23:38 hours, available at youtube.com/watch?v=dx5dGCAaGH4. ↩︎
David Levinthal, in Sarah Boxer, “Hardly Child’s Play: Shoving Toys Into Darkest Corners,” The New York Times, January 24, 1997. ↩︎
David Levinthal started photographing German war toys in a pseudo-documentary style while studying social documentary photography at Yale University. He arranged groups of tiny soldiers on a white background with a few simple props, photographing them with soft focus and printed them on sepia-tone paper, achieving a sense of intimacy and authenticity. “I try to create a feeling almost as if you were Robert Capa photographing World War II . . . where, as the viewer . . . you’re looking through the camera,” the artist explained of this work.1 When he graduated with his MFA in 1973, Levinthal showed his work to cartoonist Garry Trudeau—his Yale peer known for the Doonesbury (1970–present) comic strip—and the two embarked on a book project, Hitler Moves East: A Graphic Chronicle, 1941–43 (1977), that married Trudeau’s linear framework to Levinthal’s images. Trudeau worked from accounts of the German invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II and sent Levinthal requests for specific images. As Trudeau described, “the photographer would go to extraordinary lengths . . . including setting fire to whole sections of his living room rug, in single-minded pursuit of the desired effect.”2 Though Levinthal’s photographs didn’t hide that his subjects were toys, upon first look they seem like documentation. “I thought I was looking at real photos of World War Two,” wrote the artist Richard Prince in 2010, recalling coming across Hitler Moves East at a bookstore in 1979.3 The effect is disorienting and challenges perceptions of the veracity of images.
David Levinthal, Hitler Moves East, Mana Contemporary TV, posted December 14, 2015, video, 1:52 minutes, available at youtube.com/watch?v=bntIWGhDf20. ↩︎
Garry Trudeau, Hitler Moves East: A Graphic Chronicle, 1941–43 (Kansas City: Sheed Andrews and McMeel), 7. ↩︎
Richard Prince, “Look Out Whitey,” in David Levinthal: Bad Barbie (New York: JMc & GHB Editions, 2009). ↩︎
Using a Polaroid camera, which he began working with in 1984, David Levinthal makes soft-focus images in saturated reds and yellows and with ambiguous scale, such as in Untitled (No. 25) from the series “Desire” (1996). He creates a mise-en-scène that, between detail and obscurity, registers as authentic at first, even second glance. Levinthal leaves it up to the viewer to complete the picture from images in our own memory banks. Employing a narrow depth of field with a Polaroid camera came with its own challenges; the artist had to get so close to his subjects that the SX-70 he used early on would knock the figures over when the film ejected. When making the series “Modern Romance” (1983–85), he developed a workaround, focusing a video camera directly on the subject and streaming the image to a monitor. Levinthal then focused his Polaroid on the monitor, shooting his image as it appeared transposed on the screen.1 Despite its multiple mediations, the approximation of realness is uncanny and suggestive of the powerful role media images have on our perception of reality.
Eugenia Parry, “The Great Pretender,” in Modern Romance (Los Angeles: St. Ann’s Press, 2000), 32. ↩︎
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