I like to get to the point of an assumed reality, balanced with the knowledge that it is not real. —David Levinthal, 20001
David Levinthal burst onto the art photography scene in 1977 with the publication of Hitler Moves East: A Graphic Chronicle, 1941–43. The book’s images forecast what would become his signature approach. By arranging toys—in this case miniature German soldiers—in fabricated settings and photographing them with controlled lighting and extremely narrow focus, he achieved trompe l’oeil realism. For nearly five decades Levinthal has applied this approach to a wide range of subject matter, most of it centered on American culture. Working in series, he explored such themes as the wild west, baseball, war, space exploration, and racism. In 10 of his 22 series, he examined human sexuality. Postmodern theorists have cited Levinthal as a key figure in deconstructing popular culture and myth.
From 1999 to 2001, he used a rail-mounted Polaroid view camera that produced 20- x 24-inch images to photograph plastic figures, creating his XXX series. The Polaroid technology meant that—unlike analog photography in which multiple prints can be made from a negative or digital photography where duplicates are potentially infinite— each image is unique. Polaroid’s chemical process produced vivid, highly saturated color. It also gave him prints in a minute and a half, allowing him to quickly refine or abandon a concept. With shallow focus and controlled lighting, he performed alchemy, turning plastic into what appears to be human flesh. He photographed most of the figures—modeled on strip club dancers—numerous times adjusting the lighting, framing, and camera angles to create a widely varied, but coherent, body of 272 images. Intimate Alchemy: David Levinthal’s XXX Polaroids, an exhibition at Indiana University’s Grunwald Gallery from September 3 to November 11, 2024, comprises 26 of those Polaroids. Several of the figures are displayed near their corresponding images, allowing viewers to compare them and assess Levinthal’s transformations. It also includes 48 images from his Netsuke series.
To promote a deeper understanding of Levinthal’s achievement, this essay attempts to situate these images in four contexts: his biography, his life’s body of work, directorial photography of the late twentieth century, and postmodern theory.
From the Bay Area to the New York art world
Following World War II, Elliot Levinthal and his wife Rhoda moved from New York City to Palo Alto, where he earned a doctorate in physics at Stanford University. Rhoda’s father, a Manhattan radiologist, did not trust the doctors in Palo Alto, so Elliot took her to San Francisco to give birth to their first child, David Lawrence Levinthal, on March 8, 1949.2 David likes to joke that even though he lived there only five days, he gets to tell everybody he was born in San Francisco. Over the next few years, two brothers and a sister joined the family.
Growing up in a heady intellectual atmosphere, Levinthal took for granted that his parents regularly entertained Nobel laureates, including members of the Manhattan Project. His father had a distinguished career in science, making contributions to nuclear resonance, exobiology, space research, computer software, and medicine. Elliot’s company, Levinthal Electronics Products, “developed some of the first defibrillators, pacemakers, and cardiac monitors.”3 He co-founded Neuroscience, whose research led to “devices to filter cerebrospinal fluid to treat Alzheimer’s disease.”4 He worked for NASA and served as director of the Defense Sciences Office in the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency. He returned to Stanford, where as a research professor in mechanical engineering and an associate dean he helped incubate Silicon Valley in its early years.
Levinthal credits his parents for being “incredibly supportive,” both emotionally and financially: “I remember my mother telling me years later that she said to my father, ‘I’m just so worried, how is David going to make a living?’ And my father said, ‘It doesn’t matter, he’s happy.’”5
Television and toys populated his childhood. “Being born in ’49, I was part of what I call a, sort of, first-television generation, with the little black-and-white TVs, and predominantly filled with westerns,” he said. “The serials that were on Saturday morning, and Roy Rogers and Gene Autry and Wild Bill Hickok,”6 A photograph shows the five-year-old David lying on the floor arranging toy cowboys and Indians around plastic wigwams. These twin threads would inform his work: the toys as motif, the television as myth.
Although his parents had an appreciation of art, it was not a focus for David. He remembers childhood trips to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and a visit to the Louvre during a family vacation in Paris when he was 13. Deprecating his childhood stick-figure drawings, he said he never contemplated becoming an artist.
As a Stanford freshman in 1966, he planned to become a constitutional lawyer. He declared as a political science major, but found the introductory course boring. Stanford did not teach photography, but he found other avenues. One spin-off of the Bay Area’s anti-Vietnam War movement was the Free University, dedicated to the idea that learning should be freely available to all. He enrolled in a photography course that lasted for only two classes. In the first, he learned to develop film, in the second to make prints.
With this knowledge and his father’s Nikon camera, he began photographing in the Bay Area. He switched his major to art and filled his curriculum with independent study courses in photography. He also took classes at the Ruth Bernhard School of Photography. Bernhard was a major figure in photography, known for her nude female figures in classical poses. Levinthal said he learned lighting and advanced printing techniques at Bernhard’s school.7
As he approached graduation, he decided he wanted to study with Walker Evans, a giant in photography, who was teaching at Yale University. Yale put him on a wait list, so he took classes at the Rochester Institute of Technology during the summer of 1970. There, he discovered Kodalith paper, originally intended for use by graphic designers. “By diluting the developer with water,” Levinthal recalled, “you could get … what I thought were the most gorgeous sort of sepia tones.”8 He continued to print on Kodalith until Kodak stopped making it in 1981.
Yale’s Master of Fine Arts program in photography was still small. One of four students in his cohort, Levinthal described himself as the odd man out. For their portfolio critiques, his classmates presented beautifully crafted prints in the f.64 tradition of purist photography.
“When it was my turn, I came in with, you know, like four or five boxes, Kodalith boxes and just started stacking prints in front of the various faculty members,”9 Levinthal remembered. His teachers responded with silence. “Nobody had ever seen anything even vaguely similar to it.” Fortunately, Linda Connor, a major west coast landscape photographer, was a visiting artist. “Ah, these are amazing, these are wonderful,” Levinthal recalled her saying. “So, Linda was like that, that little push. You know, that was all I needed” to continue working.
Levinthal’s first studio work was photographing Barbie dolls. Browsing in a New Haven, Connecticut, toy store, he found toy German soldiers and began photographing them for his MFA thesis project. At the same time, his friend and classmate Garry Trudeau, was writing his thesis on a fictional Luftwaffe pilot. As an undergraduate at Yale, Trudeau launched a cartoon strip that was the forerunner of Doonesbury. When his publisher saw Levinthal’s photographs, he suggested the two collaborate on a book and gave them a $1,500 advance. (In the interim, Trudeau won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning for Doonesbury’s commentary on the Vietnam War.) It took three years, but in 1977, Hitler Moves East: A Graphic Chronicle, 1941–43 was published. The book’s documentary presentation was convincing enough that some bookstores stocked it in their history section. The images were exhibited at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, and other venues.
With his Yale MFA, Levinthal floated from university to university, teaching photography but could not secure a tenure track position. In frustration, he enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earned a master’s degree in business management in 1981. He co-founded New Venture Communications, a public relations company serving computer firms in Silicon Valley.
Back in the Bay Area, he began dating an artist. “We would talk about art,” he said, “and to impress her, I started taking photographs again.”10 The relationship lasted long enough to rekindle his interest in photography. “I had this new motivation.”
His parents were living in Washington, D.C., which gave Levinthal full run of the family home in Palo Alto. He reactivated his darkroom and appropriated his sister’s room. “I took just a folding card table and set it up in my sister’s old bedroom and started photographing things on it,”11 he recalled. “And I realized, you know, it had all been about motivation. I didn’t really need a studio.”
On business trips to New York, he would drop off prints at galleries. In 1983, Bruce Cratsley of the Marlborough Gallery invited him to be in an important group show, In Plato’s Cave. Marlborough, a prestigious gallery with branches in London and New York, specialized in paintings by nineteenth and twentieth century European masters. That it was exhibiting photography signaled the medium’s growing importance. Six other photographers were in the exhibition. All were working in what came to be called “the directorial mode,” constructing scenes and arranging objects or models for the purpose of being photographed. The title referred to an allegory from Plato’s Republic about how humans see only shadows on a cave wall, imitations of reality instead of true forms. Attention to the cave allegory had been revived by Susan Sontag in her 1977 collection of essays, On Photography. She argued that, like those shadows, photographs are inherently deceptive.
Levinthal considered moving to Los Angeles, but instead chose New York as the center of the photography world. In 1983, 10 years after graduating from Yale, he sold his share in the public relations firm, found an apartment in Tribeca near the southern tip of Manhattan and started working full time as a photographic artist. His group and one-person exhibitions began to proliferate.
A major turning point in his technical process came in 1986, when the Polaroid corporation invited him to try one of its 20- x 24-inch view cameras. The camera was one of five that were hand-made by engineers at the Polaroid corporation and intended for use by a small coterie of art photographers to showcase the vibrant color of Polaroid prints. The camera’s bellows, swings and tilts, and 600mm Fuji lens, offered precise control.
Levinthal credits the Polaroid company for giving him “a lot of support.” Although the arrangement changed over time, the company provided him with a certain number of free exposures in return for purchased exposures and an occasional print for its collection. For Levinthal, the process was even more important. “It was very similar to shooting digitally today, because the Polaroid would allow me to see things right away and make changes,”12 he said. “After 90 seconds, I’d peel the print away from the negative and see the result, and I’d be able to slightly move a figure or adjust the lighting, and take another shot,” he continued. “With the very narrow depth of field that I was using, a very slight change in focus would make a significant difference in the overall effect.” He used the Polaroid process until 2008, when he switched to digital.
Sustained body of work
The images in the Intimate Alchemy exhibition should be seen as part of a life-long body of work that began with the toy soldiers in 1972 and continues to the present. With sustained creative energy, Levinthal has explored variations on his basic approach of arranging toys, dolls, and model figures in fabricated settings, then animating those plastic objects through careful lighting and shallow focus. Human vision functions by saccades. Our eyes jump rapidly and imperceptibly from spot to spot, and our brain synthesizes the resulting sensations into a unified perception in which everything appears sharp. In camera vision, the lens’s aperture and its distance from the subject determines how much of the image appears in focus. Modernist landscape photographers in the f.64 group, named for an extremely small aperture, prized images that were sharp from the foreground to infinity. Levinthal exploited the opposite, turning most of the spatial depth in his images into a blur.
His subject matter reflects an American history and popular culture mythologized by media. He has created series on baseball and hockey, on space exploration, Barbie dolls, the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, plus U.S. and world history.
His Blackface series featured images of plaster figurines that embodied racist stereotypes: Black Sambos, Aunt Jemimas, watermelon-eating pickaninnies, and Pullman porters. In 1996, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Philadelphia abruptly canceled a planned exhibition of this series, anticipating that images of items which anyone could find in antique stores and flea markets across the country, would cause controversy. Opposition to the cancellation led to exhibitions at several other venues, a book, and support from notable Black artists, including the painter Michael Ray Charles and film director Spike Lee. In 2018, the prints were accessioned into the archives of the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan.13
Levinthal used a variety of set-ups. In the Blackface series, he arranged the figurines against a solid black backdrop. In American Beauties, he posed small dolls on what appears as a sandy beach that dissolves into a black background.
In the Wild West series, he arranged complex dioramas on a table top in his studio at the Mana Contemporary campus in Jersey City, New Jersey. He would then zoom in to photograph different segments. In Wild West, his Vietnam War photographs, and other series, he used a colored backdrop that photographed as abstract atmosphere.
Levinthal’s website lists 22 series,14 some of them with more than one iteration. Between 1986 and 2012, for example, he returned to the Wild West theme five times, showing pioneers, covered wagons, cowboys, stage coaches, and American Indians hunting buffalo and fighting soldiers. He relates these photographs to his childhood fascination with cowboy movies on television and the myth that good always triumphs over evil. Drawing on but also helping to shape America’s collective imagination, Levinthal says his photographs evoke “a west that never was, but always will be.”15
Not all of his images strive for verisimilitude. Both his 1989 and 2007 Space series feature toys that could not be mistaken for humans, no matter how shallow the focus. He makes no attempt to disguise the plastic nature of the dolls in his America Beauties and Hell’s Belles series.
Most series treat a single theme. Hockey shows action ranging from a Toronto Maple Leafs’s goalie deflecting a puck to a player hoisting the Stanley Cup overhead. Passion depicts the life of Jesus from birth to crucifixion with the stations of the cross and a pietà. By contrast, his History series portrays disconnected incidents from U.S. and world history. Most of these images reference previous photographs or paintings. There is a version of Joe Rosenthal’s 1945 Pulitzer Prize winning photograph of U.S. Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima. Another evokes Abraham Zapruder’s film of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. There’s a version of the photograph of Czar Nicolas and his family taken shortly before the Bolsheviks executed the Romanovs, plus wide views and close-ups of the Gunfight at the OK Corral. Pastiches of paintings reference Jacques Louis David’s 1784–85 Oath of the Horatii, Theodore Gericault’s 1814 Officer of the Hussars, and Eugène Delacroix’s 1830 Liberty Leading the People. In many series he showed just one photograph of each doll. In XXX, he presented several images of the same figure. His Porno series is atypical. Instead of making his own photographs, he enlarged strips of frames from pornographic films and hand tinted them.
He photographed Modern Romance with a Polaroid SX70 camera that produces an image roughly 3 inches square. This series also departed from his usual method. In various settings, he arranged dolls representing street walkers, lonely women, and couples in assignations in cheap hotel rooms, all in front of a background of projected television images. The resulting blue cast and television scan lines gave the series a somber mood. Levinthal credits Edward Hopper as inspiration. “You know, I always had loved Edward Hopper’s paintings, and I had an idea of trying to recreate some of that imagery with toy figures,”16 he said. At least two images in the series pay homage to Hopper’s 1942 painting, Nighthawks, which shows isolated individuals drinking coffee late at night in a café.
Taken as a whole, Levinthal’s work shows a fertile imagination, not just plumbing history but examining how art, photography, and other media have created our cultural stereotypes and collective memory. How we tell ourselves who we are.
In 10 series, Levinthal excavated his personal response to sexuality. Modern Romance, 1983–1985, treats emotional themes of isolation and loneliness. Hell’s Belles, 1990, showed scantily clad dolls in beach settings. In Desire, 1991–1992, he photographed Japanese-made dolls portraying Caucasian women in bondage. He never shied from controversial subjects including racial taboos. In his Bad Barbie series, he showed the blonde doll engaged in oral and vaginal sex. Her Ken doll partner was a Black Vietnam War veteran. He made these transgressive images while still a Yale student in 1972, just five years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that laws banning interracial marriage were unconstitutional.
Levinthal produced the XXX series between 1999 and 2001. With resin plastic figures ranging from about 13 to 18 inches tall as his subjects, he again used shallow focus and studio lighting to perform alchemy, transforming lumps of molded plastic into apparent human flesh. He bought the figures as kits from a Japanese company and had an associate assemble and paint them. He photographed most of them numerous times changing the lighting, cropping, angles, and focus. He explained his method:
With a number of the XXX figures, I often started with a photograph that showed a more comprehensive view of the figure. From there I might move in closer, sometimes more than once … to get a very close image of the model. In some cases, I might simply turn a figure to create different viewpoints. Because the figures were often so detailed and so beautifully painted and articulated, it was possible to create interesting images from multiple views.17
The resulting images are more thought provoking than erotic. Cecilia Andersson likened them to “a lot of female bodies which are augmented, operated, injected, sucked, and built up these days.”18 In a 2000 interview she asked Levinthal if he considered the XXX images hyper real. He responded:
I think with the XXX work I can say they are hyper unreal because women don’t look like that. There is a sort of unattainable perfection that only exists in fantasy. The whole idea of using the word perfection is somewhat incorrect. They are women without a soul. There’s sexuality but there is no intimacy. Which is the way a lot of men prefer women.19
In 2008, he started a project on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, using a 2 ¼-inch square, twin lens Rolleiflex. It was the same camera he used for Hitler Moves East, but instead of black and white film he shot with color transparency (slide) film. He showed some to his friend Trudeau, who was making the conflict central to his Doonesbury strip. “If you really want to photograph this war,” Trudeau advised him, “you have to do it digitally, because that’s how it’s being recorded.”20
Levinthal bought a used digital Hasselblad, a high-end camera made in Sweden that also produces a 2 ¼-inch square image. After the initial learning curve, he embraced the technology enthusiastically, continuing with it to the present. “What became so fascinating to me was that there was no limit to what you could photograph,” he says. “It was endless, and you could really move things around and experiment and not feel like, well, that [exposure] is going to cost me $125 …. It was really that … project that…, sort of, made it become, you know, the main—really the sole tool for me.”21
Levinthal did commercial work and assignments for publications. He photographed advertisement images for Absolut Vodka, H. Stern jewelry, IBM, and Chanel perfume. Spike Lee, recruited him to photograph an illustration to accompany an article about Lee in Playboy magazine. The tightly cropped photograph of the breasts and buttocks of several nude women, in the manner of the French photographer Lucien Clergue, was the only occasion when Levinthal, as a mature artist, photographed human models instead of objects. He also photographed for the New York Times and American Health magazine.
During the modernist period, critics disdained and most art photographers declined such commissions. With its romanticized myth of the heroic artist who would rather starve in a garret than submit to a patron’s demands, the art for art’s sake movement presumed that working for hire compromised the artist’s integrity. Levinthal is more interested in communicating to a wide audience. Asked if he would let Hustler magazine publish his XXX photos, he replied:
Absolutely. In some ways I’d relish the opportunity because it would be a way of taking the imagery out of the pristine and sacrosanct art world. It would allow me to reach a huge number of people, a much greater audience than would ever see this in let’s say an art gallery or a museum.22
In the early twentieth century, the Gestalt psychologists developed a theory of human perception that included closure as a major principle. It posits that humans fill gaps in their sensations to form complete perceptions. Our compelling need to create meaning causes us to supply sensory data when it’s missing. Levinthal acknowledged employing closure. “I felt that a large part of my work is almost like a Rorschach test for the viewer,” he said. “There’s not a lot of detail often. … You’re looking at an out-of-focus cowboy on a horse, and you’re filling in all this information based on your own memory and your own experience.”23
Levinthal’s photographs have been called ambiguous, controversial, disturbing, abstract. Perhaps the term elusive best describes how they function. Elusive applies to Levinthal’s Desire and XXX series. As Lisa Hostetler explained, “Desire depends on the absence of its object.… Once desire is satisfied, the pleasure associated with it is thus extinguished.” Alluding to closure, she wrote, “Levinthal effectively activated the mechanics of desire by leaving most of the tale untold.”24 She sharpens this point: “The realism of a photograph is inversely proportional to its specificity; the more concretely a fantasy is delineated, the less room there is for desire to maneuver, reducing the photograph’s chances of inducing an emotional response.”25 This is what the soft focus accomplishes. This lack of specificity is how Levinthal achieves his objective. This elusiveness is how closure works.
A second important point for understanding Levinthal’s work is that he does not furnish his images with judgments. In Hitler Moves East, he does not demonize the German soldiers but portrays them as universal men facing death in battle. In his Blackface series, he does not condemn the racism that prompted so many people to collect such offensive memorabilia. In reimagining Custer’s Last Stand, he makes no moral distinction between the U.S. soldiers and the Sioux warriors.
In his introduction to the Modern Romance catalog, Barton D. Thurber argued the series lacks a moral center: “The coherence, the order, the sense the world is supposed to make, is somewhere outside the frame,” he wrote. “And love … is either missing entirely or perverted into stark brutality. … This is what the world looks like, deprived of the moral legitimacy of a center.”26 Hostetler insisted this moral ambiguity is deliberate.
Levinthal intentionally forces the viewer to make a judgment. “His work’s refusal of a perceivable ideological or political agenda places the moral quandaries it implies squarely at viewers’ feet, or, rather, in their eyes and minds,” she wrote.27
As measures of his stature, Levinthal’s photographs are in the permanent collections of more than 55 museums and collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Bibliotheque Nationale and Centre Pompidou in Paris.28 In addition, he has mounted more than 150 one-artist exhibitions29 and been included in more than 205 group shows in national and international museums and galleries.30 He has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Influenced by, but also influencing directorial photography
No artist wants to be pigeon holed. Categorizing an artist can short circuit a deep response to their work. Nonetheless, most viewers want to understand how an artist fits in the larger creative environment. There are several ways to position Levinthal in late twentieth century photography. One is by considering the photographic act as a continuum between take and make, capture and create. At one end, photojournalists, documentarians, and purists try to capture reality with as little intervention as possible. The French photojournalist Henri Cartier-Bresson with his concept of seizing “the decisive moment” was a prime exemplar. So were art photographers in the purist tradition. In Edward Weston’s photographs of pristine landscapes, the only mediation was the selection of a place to position his camera and his technical choices about lenses, exposures, and darkroom processes.
Towards the middle of the continuum, the great majority of photographers combine take and make. Asking a subject to repeat a gesture, suggesting she turn her head slightly and smile, choosing a spot light instead of a flood for a food illustration all impose a degree of control onto a photograph that still reads as an instance of real-world time and space.
At the make end, the tradition of constructed photography began in England less than two decades after photography was announced. In 1856, Oscar Rejlander spent six weeks creating The Two Ways of Life, a photo montage that seamlessly combined 32 images into an allegory about a young man being asked to choose between a life of virtue or wantonness. Queen Victoria bought several copies. Henry Peach Robinson’s 1858 Fading Away portrayed a young girl on her death bed, surrounded by grieving family members. Convincing enough to disturb Victorian sensibilities, it was composited from five negatives of posed models.
In the make tradition, many art photographers create their own realities. In her Kitchen Table series, Carrie Mae Weems posed models around a dramatically lit butcher block table to explore ideas about race, gender, intimacy, love, and loss. Convincingly portraying the lived experience of Black women, her fiction expressed a truth deeper than fact. At the far extreme, Joel-Peter Witkin created fantastical, macabre nightmares that no one would imagine as real.
Levinthal belongs at the make end of the continuum. His work is sometimes described as staged, and that is accurate in the sense that movies and plays are staged. In common parlance, however, the word carries a connotation of dishonest, untrustworthy, faked. Constructed is a useful term. As Barry Perlus, professor of photography at Cornell University, explained, “The constructed image depends on artifice and invention to create or manipulate the subject.” The photographer accomplishes this by using “a vast range of techniques including lighting, staging, styling, directing, crafting, scripting, and more.”31 This might serve as an outline of Levinthal’s process.
Perhaps most useful is the concept of the directorial mode, articulated by the photography critic A.D. Coleman in a 1976 essay in Artforum: “The photographer consciously and intentionally creates events for the express purpose of making images thereof.”32 The photograph represents something “which would not have occurred had the photographer not made it happen.” For Coleman, the key distinction between take and make “is between treating the external world as a given, to be altered only through photographic means … [or] as raw material, to be itself manipulated.” Because many viewers equate photographs with reality, he continued, “such images use photography’s overt veracity against the viewer, exploiting that initial assumption of credibility by evoking it for events and relationships generated by the photographer’s deliberate structuring of what takes place in front of the lens.”
Levinthal acknowledges pitting photography’s presumed veracity against the viewer. That is the point of the epigraph quoted at the beginning of this essay. But he goes a step beyond Coleman. He wants viewers to balance their assumption of credibility “with the knowledge that [the photograph] is not real.”33 The magic comes in seeing an image both ways.
Although Levinthal contributed to the directorial mode movement, he was also shaped by it. At the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1970, he met Les Krims, who directed photographs of his friends and mother. Levinthal has spoken several times about Cindy Sherman and others using this approach. Participation in the In Plato’s Cave exhibition and immersion in the New York photography world would have acquainted him with several peers working in the directorial mode. None of this positioning denies his originality, but rather elucidates that his work both absorbed and enlarged a movement at a particular time in the history of photography.
Levinthal’s work intersects with postmodern theory
If Levinthal had produced his oeuvre in another era, his photographs might have aroused interest for their uncanny metamorphosis of plastic into convincing human flesh, but they would hardly have propelled him to the stature of a world-class artist. He had the fortuitous timing to debut his work in the 1970s when photography was gaining ascendancy in the art world and was providing grist for the postmodern critics and theorists dominating art discourse. Postmodernism in the U.S. was a reworking of ideas by French and European intellectuals, who were exploring epistemological questions about the impossibility of humans apprehending reality.
One major premise is that humans can have no direct knowledge of reality. Language separates us at least one remove. All knowledge is constructed. Everything we think we know is mediated by language or images. Both are complex systems of signs and symbols that function by convention independent of reality. Postmodern critics argued at length, often vehemently, that the photograph was a construct. That it was so altered by the photographer’s vision and the camera’s technology that it bore little or no relation to reality. That freezing an instant of time and framing a small rectangle of space disrupted the flux of the universe. As Coleman stated, “We must recognize that the interruption of a fluidly and ceaselessly moving three-dimensional gestalt and its reduction to a static two-dimensional abstraction is a tampering with reality of such magnitude that the only virginity one could claim for any instance of it would be strictly technical at best.”34
Postmodern discourse embraced Levinthal and his peers whose directed images were clearly removed from reality. When Cindy Sherman constructed a stage setting, applied make-up, assembled a costume, and photographed herself as an ingénue, career woman, or battered wife, there was no actual referent, only generalized stereotypes about how women were portrayed in B-grade movies. Postmodern writers pointed to such directed images as proof that all reality was mediated. The key word was representation, and the codes by which it functioned were deeply suspect. As Abigail Solomon-Godeau, an art critic and historian, wrote in her catalog essay for the In Plato’s Cave exhibition, “Postmodern artists … are content to more or less coolly dissect and interrogate the ways in which reality is constructed as representation.”35
Levinthal’s work served postmodern critics in at least three important ways. Because he achieved verisimilitude in transforming plastic figures into seemingly real people, theorists argued that his work questions the nature of photography and, more importantly, of reality. By extension, they could insist that all photographs were fabrications and the medium was untrustworthy. An early example of this position appeared in a review of the 1978 exhibition of Hitler Moves East at the George Eastman House. Sally Eauclaire wrote, “Levinthal’s exercises in artifice … force every viewer who was fooled even for a minute to wonder how many faked photographs he has seen in newspapers or magazines and accepted as incontrovertible evidence.”36
Second, Levinthal explored a wide swath of American culture from baseball to Barbie, from the wild west to war. Most Americans’ knowledge of important people and events exists from second- or third-hand accounts. With rare exceptions, we do not witness history or encounter famous people directly. That doesn’t mean the events did not happen, but that our understanding of them has been filtered through the perspectives of other people. Our knowledge derives from new reports, history books, paintings, photographs, movies, television, and more recently the Internet. Most often, this process transforms the people and events into myths serving the larger ideology of American exceptionalism. By calling attention to this mythologizing, the critics argued, Levinthal’s photographs exposed it. When he arranged toys to depict George Washington crossing the Delaware, it was a pastiche of Emanuel Leutze’s 1851 painting, itself an imagined heroization of an event that happened 65 years earlier. When he photographed a toy Joe DiMaggio slugging a home run, he celebrates the great player’s achievement but also asks viewers to reflect on how much historical faith we should invest. Did it actually happen like this? Where is the line between realism and symbolism?
Finally, a major branch of postmodernism was feminist criticism, which stressed that women have been objectified and marginalized, and their contributions minimalized. On first glance Levinthal’s photographs in the Hell’s Belles, Desire, and XXX series appear to objectify the female body, turning it into an item of consumption for male gratification, the oft denigrated “male gaze.” Postmodernists could argue, however, that when viewers realize the subjects are plastic dolls in fabricated settings, these images can be understood to expose and critique that gaze. Because what appears to be real is not actually real, viewers are forced to examine stereotypes about women, their bodies and how the media represents and misrepresents them.
Not all writers agreed. In an Artforum review, Charles Hagen argued that Levinthal and other photographers in the In Plato’s Cave exhibition failed to critique mainstream narratives but actually reinforced them. “When post-Modernism fails, it becomes simply a restatement, and a reinforcement, of the very codes of representation that it proposes to subvert,” Hagen wrote. “David Levinthal’s set-ups of dolls in steamy assignations … don’t so much analyze or provide a critical view of the conventions they present as merely reiterate them.”37
To state the obvious, the critics’ interpretations of Levinthal’s work do not equal his intentions. He has a clear understanding of what he is doing. Although he prefers to talk about collecting toys and his photographic process, he does not shrink from discussing intention, meaning, and the audience’s reception of his images. He recalled a review of a retrospective at the George Eastman Museum “in which this one young art critic had written quite extensively about what she felt were my failings to incorporate, particularly in my Western work, any references to or understanding of the issues of Native Americans.” He continued, “And I read the review, and I thought that my role as an artist as I see it is not to be all encompassing, but is, in my particular case, I think drawing on my own personal history.”38
Conclusion
For some viewers, the photograph itself is enough. Contemplating an image, immersing oneself in it, synthesizing it with one’s life experience, enjoying an aesthetic response, and, perhaps, articulating an intellectual interpretation suffices. Others want more. Everything—every object, event, idea, experience, every photograph—is the result of long chains of cause and effect. The XXX photographs in this exhibition did not spring out of nowhere. They were made by a man immersed in and affected by many contexts who affected them, in turn. A man full of complexities, contradictions, uncertainties, strivings, desires, as all humans are. This essay—also the result of cause and effect—has tried to suggest some of those chains. Although admittedly incomplete, it sketches the lineaments of biographical, historical, creative, and critical contexts with the hope the viewer might explore them further. It is not a substitute for a sustained and serious engagement of Levinthal’s images, but it may serve as a supplement.
About the author. Claude Cookman earned an MA in art history and a Ph.D. in the history of photography from Princeton University. His research focused on Henri Cartier-Bresson and other French magazine photojournalists working in the humanist tradition. He taught visual communications and the history of photography for more than 24 years at Indiana University, where he is now a professor emeritus. He served on the board of trustees of the Kinsey Institute for six years, including two as chair.
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Endnotes
1 “David Levinthal — Interviewed by Cecilia Andersson” in David Levinthal XXX, Paris: Galerie Xippas, 2000, p. 10.
2. All dates in this essay are taken from “Selected Chronology,” War, Myth, Desire, pp. 266–276.
3. “Elliott Levinthal, Stanford professor emeritus of mechanical engineering, dead at 89.” Stanford Report, January 23rd, https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2012/01/elliott-levinthal-stanford-professor-emeritus-mechanical-engineering-dead-89 (Downloaded, August 24, 2024).
4. Ibid.
5.“Oral history interview with David Levinthal, 2021 October 4-5.” Smithsonian Archives of American Art. https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-david-levinthal-22099 (Downloaded, August 24, 2024). Much of the essay’s biographical section stems from this interview.
6. Ibid.
7. David Levinthal in a Zoom video conference with the Intimate Alchemy exhibition curatorial team, April 11, 2024.
8. Op. cit., Smithsonian.
9. Ibid. All quotes this paragraph.
10. Ibid. All quotes this paragraph.
11. Ibid. All quotes this paragraph.
12. Jeremy Sigler, “Nice Boy Shares Toy,” Tablet, May 24, 2018, https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/nice-boy-shares-toy (Downloaded August 24, 2024). All quotes this paragraph.
13. “Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia receives artwork donation valued at $2 million,” WKTV.org Journal, Feb. 8, 2018, https://www.wktvjournal.org/jim-crow-museum-of-racist-memorabilia-receives-artwork-donation-valued-at-2-million/ (Downloaded August 24, 2024).
14. “David Levinthal: Artwork.” https://davidlevinthal.com/artwork/ (Downloaded, August 24, 2024).
15. Op. cit., Smithsonian.
16. Op. cit., Smithsonian.
17. Email from David Levinthal to Claude Cookman, August 21, 2024.
18. Op. cit., Xippas, p. 10.
19. Op. cit., Xippas, p. 10.
20. Op. cit., Smithsonian.
21. Ibid.
22. Op. cit., Xippas, 10.
23. Op. cit., Smithsonian.
24. Lisa Hostetler, “The Art of David Levinthal: Photography, History, and the Modern American Psyche,” in op. cit., War, Myth, Desire. 24.
25. Ibid.
26. Barton D. Thurber in David Levinthal, Modern Romance (San Diego: Aaron Press and Founders Gallery, University of San Diego, 1985), n.p. quoted in ibid., Hostetler, 17.
27. Op. cit., Hostetler, 35.
28. “David Levinthal: Selected Public Collections,” at https://davidlevinthal.com/exhibitions/ Downloaded June 10, 2024.
29. “David Levinthal: Selected One-Person Exhibitions,” at https://davidlevinthal.com/exhibitions/ (Downloaded August 24, 2024).
30. Ibid. “David Levinthal: Selected Group Exhibitions,” at https://davidlevinthal.com/exhibitions/ (Downloaded August 24, 2024).
31. https://www.coursicle.com/cornell/courses/ART/3606/(Downloaded August 24, 2024).
32. A.D. Coleman, “The directorial mode: Notes Toward a Definition,” Artforum, n.p. republished at https://www.artforum.com/features/the-directorialmode-notes-toward-a-definition-214077/ All quotes this paragraph. (Downloaded August 24, 2024).
33.Op. cit., Xippas, 10.
34. Op. cit., Coleman.
35. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, In Plato’s Cave (New York: Marlborough Gallery, 1983), 2, quoted in op. cit., Hosteler, 15.
36. Sally Eauclaire, “Hitler: A Chronicle of Horror,” Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, February 19, 1978, quoted in Hostetler, 10.
37. Charles Hagen, “Reviews: In Plato’s Cave, Marlborough Midtown,” Artforum, n.p. reprinted in https://www.artforum.com/events/in-platoscave-225850/ (Downloaded August 24, 2024).
38. Op. cit., Smithsonian.