David Levinthal photographs 4-inch toys in poses that are disturbingly real. His work, displayed in more than three dozen museums, generates anxiety and provokes debate.
Story by Blake Hallanan
Photography by David Levinthal
Gallery
A cowboy struts outside a saloon. A
curvaceous woman with glossy red lips poses suggestively in the sand. A
soldier in combat wades through waist-deep snow. These are the subjects
that people David Levinthal’s photographs. But take a closer look.
These subjects are not people -- they’re tiny toys arranged to
depict real life. Levinthal, ’70, uses the ambiguity between
reality and artifice to make his audience do a double-take.
Playing with toys is therefore serious business for photographer David Levinthal. In fact, it is his only business. For more than 20 years, he has ingeniously staged 4-inch-tall figures in intricately designed dioramas -- and in the process he has made headlines across the art world.
Levinthal’s latest exhibition, Barbie Millicent Roberts: An Original, opens this October in Santa Monica in conjunction with the publication of a book of the same name. The 20-by-24 Polaroid close-ups of Barbie will undoubtedly stir much interest during their nationwide tour -- as have his eight previous series. They range in subject from the isolation of urban life (Modern Romance) to the Holocaust (Mein Kampf) to racism (Blackface) to the mythic frontier (The Wild West).
Levinthal’s career in photography started traditionally enough. As a native Californian, he made images of the landscape in the style of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. But when he went to Yale graduate school to study photography, he switched to a smaller camera and decided to explore photography in a studio. He started by trying to recreate images that had been playing in his head since childhood. He bought a small collection of toy soldiers at a department store and began staging battles with them. Soon he was haunting the local hobby shop, buying tiny artifacts. One day, he brought home a model bridge and placed it in the middle of a battle scene. Then he set it alight and photographed it. He had become engaged by a world of toys.
Coincidentally, a Yale classmate, Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau, was researching his thesis project, a fictional biography of a Luftwaffe pilot named Erich Becker. The publishers of Doonesbury saw Levinthal’s war photos and suggested the two collaborate on a book. Three-and-a-half years later, in 1977, their book, Hitler Moves East: A Graphic Chronicle, 1941-43, was published, with photos by Levinthal and text by Trudeau.
“Ever since I began working with toys, I have been intrigued with the idea that these seemingly benign objects could take on such incredible power and personality simply by the way they were photographed,” Levinthal says. “I began to realize that by carefully selecting the depth of field and making it narrow, I could create a sense of movement and reality that was in fact not there.” For example, one photograph in Hitler Moves East shows a tank coming over a bridge. The tip of the gun is in focus and the tank is out of focus. That small detail creates a sense that the tank is moving. Through such constant experimentation, Levinthal honed the techniques that allowed him to breathe life into these inanimate objects.
Hitler Moves East became a cult classic among young artists, but it was six more years before Levinthal would devote himself to a career in photography. He earned a management degree from MIT in 1981, founded a Bay Area public relations firm specializing in high tech and squeezed photography into his spare time. But he sold his company in 1983, and this gave him the financial independence to move to New York and become a full-time photographer. His first major exhibit was at UC-San Diego in 1985. Today, his work is in the collections of more than 35 museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the Biblioth