Remind you of anything?

War Games
by Vince Aletti

The grainy haze that settles over the soldiers in David Levinthal’s photographs isn’t the fog of war, it’s the impressionistic murk that results from setting his camera lens for an extremely shallow depth of field. The artistic effect is necessary to prevent—or at least delay—the recognition that the soldiers are all model toys. The pictures, published in 1977 in the book “Hitler Moves East,” a collaboration with Levinthal’s fellow Yale School of Art grad student Garry Trudeau, are having a timely revival at John McWhinnie @ Glenn Horowitz Bookseller. Levinthal has made a career of turning scale-model figures into soft-focus icons, but this series remains a crucial turning point. As Trudeau notes in the book, the images “set up an exquisite tension . . . between the innocence of the facsimile and the insidiousness of the original.” Displayed alongside Nazi source material and the tiny toys themselves, the sepia-toned photographs have a peculiar power. We know they’re far from real, but, when it comes to war, deception and confusion still rule.

From The New Yorker, April 21, 2008.