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Sunday Salon - David Levinthal
Daily Ink
Stored in: Sunday Salon
Posted On: October 30 2006
By: Bryan Partington
Archival Photo
In 1971 the ugly finale of the Vietnam war was being played out on television. Levinthal was a student of photography at Yale’s Department of Design. He and another student (Garry Trudeau…later to become the creator of Doonesbury) began to create war vignettes using toy figurines. They didn’t use the ongoing war in Southeast Asia, but the war of their parents generation…the Nazi army’s invasion of the Soviet Union. Those early photographs grew in complexity and eventually became Levinthal’s first book: Hitler Moves East.
This book developed a cult following among young photographers of that generation. Cindy Sherman credits Levinthal’s photographs with “pushing photography away from the sternly mimetic documentary style of the 1960s toward a more playful, artificial relation to the world.” Of course, many people objected (and still object) to making war “more playful.”
making war "more playful" .. hmmm .. controversial stuff.
.. and yet the photos ARE playful, so how controversial can they really be?
I suppose the side I come down on is that war and play seem to be intimately entangled and that to deny the connection is to ignore one of the more happily destructive aspects of our natures.
Not that "Hitler Moves East" goes about anything happily. Playfully, yes, but in a serious way that articulates the gloom and terror of the symbolized violence.
Anyhow, that's enough out of me. Now it is your turn.
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Utata Ink is a daily publication edited by Bryan Partington (striatic). Photos used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and obtained via the flickr API unless otherwise noted. To make a contribution to Ink, please visit Ink Me.
