David Levinthal
United States, b. 1949

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.