Dates: | 1949 - | Born: | US, CA, San Francisco | Uses miniature figures in artificial settings to recreate historical events (Hitler Moves East and Mein Kampf) or to reflect on social issues (The Wild West, Modern Romance, XXX 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)
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