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(1938).DAVID LEVINTHAL
American
Since 1972, David Levinthal has photographed his
collection of toy figures, models, and historical fig-
urines, and this unique work has defined him as
one of the leading postmodern artists in America.
Levinthal uses Polaroid’s instant SX-70 and mam-
moth 20 24-inch cameras to photograph his
tabletop tableaux. The resulting images expose
and critique cultural myths and stereotypes, parti-
cularly American cultural stereotypes around
racism and sex, as well as historical events around
which myth and stereotypes have grown, such as
Nazism or the Holocaust. Like his contemporaries,
Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, and Laurie Sim-
mons, Levinthal draws much of his inspiration and
imagery from the myths and icons that appear in
film noir, pulp novels, romance books, pin-up
magazines, advertising, and television.
Levinthal exploits the veracity of the photo-
graphic medium to create images that question
the nature of representation. His photographs of
staged tableaux are a groundbreaking example of
what many postmodern artists were doing in the
late 1970s and 1980s—constructing and staging
scenes for the camera. Critic A. D. Coleman
referred to this working method as ‘‘the directorial
mode,’’ underscoring the idea the photographer
controls every detail of the scene to be photo-
graphed. During these decades, many other artists
including Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman, Sandy
Skoglund, and Joel-Peter Witkin made images of
elaborately staged subjects that evoke the feel of
reality, because they are photographed in a straight
documentary style, but are in fact photographic
fictions of artificial moments.
Born in San Francisco on March 8, 1949, Le-
vinthal grew up in a wealthy Jewish family. In
1966, he took a basic photography class his fresh-
man year at Stanford’s Free University in Palo
Alto. He practiced the West Coast aesthetic of
masters Edward Weston and Ansel Adams; he
even studied the nude with Adams’s contemporary
Ruth Bernhard. Levinthal’s early work of pinball
players and storefronts in Santa Cruz and railway
cars in Palo Alto reflect the street photography
style popularized by Lee Friedlander and others
in the 1960s. After graduating from Stanford with
a degree in studio art in 1970, from 1971–1973, he
pursued a master of fine art’s degree in photogra-
phy at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut,
where he explored his fascination with American
popular culture. Initially, he made close-up photo-
graphs of M&M’s and Chuckles candies and
donuts, which garnered the attention of his instruc-
tor Walker Evans. By the winter of 1972, Levinthal
had begun photographing toy soldiers engaged in
battle on his linoleum floor.
What began as part of Levinthal’s MFA thesis
developed into a three-and-a-half year collabora-
tion with his friend and fellow classmate Garry
Trudeau, who went on to create the cartoon strip
Doonsbury. This collaboration resulted in Le-
vinthal’s first photographic series and the publica-
tion ofHitler Moves East: A Graphic Chronicle,
1941–1943of 1977, with a text by Trudeau. Inspired
by the war photographs of Robert Capa, Levinthal
arranged toy soldiers in elaborate artificial set-
tings—using potting soil, flour for snow, even
fire—to recreate the Eastern Front and Hitler’s
invasion of Russia. He photographed with a Rollei
SL-66 camera and sepia toned the grainy black-and-LEVINTHAL, DAVID