David Levinthal is one of those photographers who makes you question what you are actually looking at. Using toys, dolls and the miniature figures of my youth, he constructs carefully staged scenes that look almost like documentary photographs, playing with our ideas of reality, memory and American mythology. From the Wild West to the Vietnam War, Barbie and baseball, and scenes from movies, his images are both playful and unsettling, turning childhood objects into a way of exploring much more serious subjects. He does not document reality as it exists around us, but rather the fantasies we have created around it. The Battle of Little Bighorn, as depicted in They Died with Their Boots On with Errol Flynn; the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, a 30-second shootout that somehow made its way to us, together with the epic death of G.A. Custer, illuminated my childhood imagination; the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima, immortalised in one of the most famous photographs in history; the assassination of JFK. Moments of American history, carefully reenacted for Levinthal’s lens. Walking through the large exhibition at H’ART Museum in Amsterdam “American Myth and Memory”, I found myself amused, puzzled and surprised by the pictures. I was particularly drawn to his interpretations of the Wild West (true or invented and possibly enacted by John Wayne) and moments from contemporary US history. I cared less for the baseball and Barbie photographs, which felt more specific to an American audience and to a cultural universe that is perhaps less familiar to me.
