Contemporary Media Photographer

Modern Romance, 1984-86
Mein Kampf, 1993-94
Space, 2007.

David Levinthal

David Levinthal was born in San Francisco, CA, in 1949. He received his BA in Studio Art at Stanford University in 1970, his MFA of photography at Yale, and an SM in Management Science at MIT in 1981. So, basically, he was a pretty smart guy. He currently resides in New York City, New York.

What is probably most unique about his work is his use of toys. Levinthal uses toys to recreate the experiences of a childhood influenced by pop culture, and the way in which our culture has socialized our children into acting a certain way, and believing certain things, through toys.

In all of his photos, Levinthal gets very close to his subject, often constructing a kind of shadowy scene in which to reside. The subjects are centered and take up almost the entire frame, and the lighting is dim and usually from above or behind. The images are blurry, and make the line between reality and imaginary an ambiguous one.

In the top photo, this ambiguity is the most apparent. A night scene is constructed, with a man in a suit and a woman, who looks taken by surprise, on a street corner. The man seems to appraise her, and the blurriness of the photo makes one feel uncomfortable to view this, as if it was taken by a security camera instead of being viewed live. We are witnessing the scene, and not on the same level as the subjects. The fact that these are toys leads to several unsettling conclusions--one, that toys like this even exist, and two, that our culture is socializing our young to view these kinds of scenes without any seriousness. It is all child's play.

To create the scenes, Levinthal uses shoe boxes and cardboard to create dark passages and a feeling of intimacy and secrecy. He uses large-format Polaroid photography, and takes as his subject toys reflecting the pop culture of America.

Levinthal's aim in creating these images is to "cause his audience to question the ambiguity found in this dialectic between artificiality and reality", by using children's toys to make the viewer also consider the implications of the toys we as a culture make, and the kinds of messages they convey not only to children, but to humanity in general. We make representations of reality in order to learn about reality, but toys themselves are not reality, and the reality we learn is itself skewed.

I really like the idea behind his work, but I think I'm just drawn to the images themselves, because I did a lot of this kind of photography myself when I was little. With my old film camera, I would constantly set up scenes with my horse models and try to create realistic images. They almost never worked out, but I loved trying. With the advent of digital photography, this has become so much easier to do, but my old photos did have that same weird, blurry atmosphere like Levanthal's. They're nostalgic, but his concepts are a lot darker.

http://www.davidlevinthal.com/works.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Levinthal