Untitled
This photograph of toy soldiers and tanks in battle predates by three years Levinthal’s collaborative project with the cartoonist Garry Trudeau published in 1977 as Hitler Moves East: A Graphic Chronicle, 1941–43. Although the picture was staged on the linoleum bedroom floor of the artist’s childhood home in California, it has the gritty out-of-focus quality of a war photographer’s image sent back from the front. By perceptively shortening the camera’s depth of field, Levinthal invested the picture with a palpable sense of movement. The effect is not exactly that of actual war but of child’s play gone terribly awry.
Artwork Details
- Title: Untitled
- Artist: David Levinthal (American, born 1949)
- Date: 1972
- Medium: Gelatin silver print
- Dimensions: 18 x 22.9 cm (7 1/16 x 9 in. )
- Classification: Photographs
- Credit Line: Purchase, Rhoda and Elliott Levinthal Gift, 1997
- Object Number: 1997.50.1
- Rights and Reproduction: © David Levinthal
- Curatorial Department: Photographs
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