| Dates: | 1949 - | | Born: | US, CA, San Francisco | | Gender: | Male |
Uses miniature figures in artificial settings to recreate historical events (Hitler Moves East) or to reflect on social issues (The Wild West and the Black Face series).Preparing biographies
Biography provided by Focal Press
Raised in California (art degree, Stanford 1970) Levinthal later earned an MFA at Yale where cartoonist, Garry Trudeau, was a classmate and early collaborator on the book, Hitler Moves East (1977), which featured Trudeau’s text and Levinthal’s table top photographs of toy soldiers in a mock-documentary style that was a precursor for the emerging post-modernist movement in photography. The use of toys, dolls, and scale models in the studio to produce faux documents that offer variable comment upon history and culture was a trademark of Levinthal’s many themes and book publications in the 1980s and 1990s. Levinthal’s progression of themes has evolved from sly parody of the Western cowboy to more barbed visual pronouncements about T&A pin-ups, bondage, the Holocaust, pornography, and racism. Each theme, usually displayed in saturated colors, has been an exegesis of spectator voyeurism. Using ambiguous space and thin slices of selected focus, Levinthal offers viewers an artificial body or dramatic pose that transforms cultural stereotypes into visual codes that viewers recognize as reminiscent of past memory — perpetuated in modern society by toymakers and tchotchke vendors. Levinthal’s most intense work (Desire, Mein Kampf, Blackface, XXX) has raised controversy when critics can’t agree on the propriety of an artist who trumps history with seductive images that are interpretations of society’s coercion, lust, and depravity.
(Author: Ken White - Rochester Institute of Technology)
Michael Peres (Editor-in-Chief), 2007, Focal Encyclopedia of Photography, 4th edition, (Focal Press) [ISBN-10: 0240807405, ISBN-13: 978-0240807409]
(Used with permission)
Readings on, or by, individual photographers
Levinthal, D., 1993, Desire, (San Francisco: Friends of Photography) [Essay by A. Grundberg.] [Δ]
Levinthal, D., 1997, David Levinthal: Work from 1975–1996, (New York: ICP) [Δ]
Levinthal, D., 2001, David Levinthal: Modern Romance, (Los Angeles: St. Ann’s Press) [Essay by E. Parry] [Δ]
If you feel this list is missing a significant book or article please let me know - Alan - alan@luminous-lint.com | |
Family history
If you are related to this photographer and interested in tracking down your extended family we can place a note here for you to help. It is free and you would be amazed who gets in touch.
alan@luminous-lint.com |
|
