Book Review: David Levinthal's Vietnam

Photograph by David Levinthal. Courtesy of the artist.

By DAVID JAGER July 8, 2024

David Levinthal, famous for his fine art photographs of toys and miniatures, has finally approached the delicate and treacherous subject matter of the Vietnam war. A traumatic fault line in American collective memory spanning several generations, Levinthal’s portrayal of the war was a project that proved so rich and technically daunting that he hasn’t dared embark on it until recently.  Now, after a career spanning nearly fifty years, he has a new book, published by Kehrer Press, featuring 132 color plates that treat both the reality and the myth of Vietnam through painstakingly accurate, detailed dioramas.

I caught up with Levinthal in his enormous and airy Soho loft, which is replete with shelves of art books, toys, and large prints of his iconic photos. A cowboy surveys a soft horizon on horseback in one, in another a trio of female barbie dolls stand staring framed against a pillowy blue sky. Mr. Levinthal has always excelled at probing the myths of American popular culture using toys, in ways that are often downright unnerving. In person, however, he is a kindly, avuncular man, who greets me at the door flanked by his two beloved mutts.

“I’d been circling around the idea of working on the Vietnam war since the very beginning” he said once we were settled. “After all, my work with toys began with toy soldiers during my graduate work at Yale, when I had bought and photographed a box of them over Christmas. But until recently, it never seemed like the right time.”

Part of the problem was finding the proper figures and dioramic settings. The other was finding the fortitude to broach such a thorny historical subject. He is part of the generation that protested the war, often in the company of his lifelong friend Gary Trudeau (they met at Yale Graduate school).  He remembers the controversy vividly.

Photograph by David Levinthal. Courtesy of the artist.

Even so, Mr. Levinthal’s impetus is not political in any superficial sense. He is not looking to score ideological points, but rather go deeper into a moment, a feeling surrounding a great transitional and traumatic point in American culture. As such, the photographs in this series attempt to elicit the feeling tone and the tensions of Vietnam rather than the minute historical facts. Levinthal aims for the haunting visceral realities beneath those facts, and he rarely misses.

Mr. Levinthal’s painstaking recreations meet at the psychological juncture between boyish imagining and adult reckoning. As such they also suggest the floating unreality of shock, as well as combat’s traumatic aftermath. Selective and singular focus, smoke, and the hint of fiery devastation somewhere in the background. Figures are seen in moments of decisive action: grunts jumping from combat helicopters, officers barking into coms, field medics tending to the wounded. Many of the shots recall the photojournalism of the era, the immersive media that brought the war into American living rooms.

A US special forces officer from the conflict, E Patrick Gallagher, provided invaluable information and many of his own painstakingly built dioramas of arenas of conflict. As the project ballooned, Mr. Levinthal realized he needed an eyewitness, someone who had had their boots on the ground.

“Pat was invaluable” Levinthal tells me “ he was a special forces veteran, a retired lieutenant colonel who obviously takes these things very seriously. We met through the historical toy and figure community. I bought one of his dioramas, such as the wall at Hue and a street scene in Hue. He also made figures. This long friendship ensued, where I would send him jpegs and I would get his feedback” he said.

The Hue photos, close to the back of the book, are so astutely staged they have a palpable, narrative electricity. Levinthal places his platoon members creeping along the wall and bridge into the city in such a way you feel the heart in mouth tension of the mission. Mr. Levinthal admits to immersing himself in the movie ‘Platoon’ during the research phase of his project- the movie he says veterans refer to as the most accurate feeling wise- and while the shots never replicate the movie exactly, they have an immersive, cinematic feel.

Other realistic shots were not the result of careful staging however, but were happy accidents instead. Mr. Levinthal points to a dramatic print of a Huey helicopter in liftoff at night against what appeared to be a background of bright rounds of ammunition fire, lighting up the sky.

“That was actually a type of iridescent fabric we had hanging in the background, and when the print developed, the light glancing off of it looked like tracer bullets….”

Levinthal has always careened between the gritty and the elegiac in his work, approaching American culture in ways that are both confrontational and nostalgic. He has investigated grim subjects such as the holocaust, anti-black racism, and sexism, but he has also approached the lore of the Western, baseball and Barbie. Mr. Levinthal is keenly aware of the divides and taboo areas of collective American consciousness, both light and dark, and he has navigated them skillfully, albeit not without controversy, throughout his esteemed career.

In one of the accompanying texts of the book, the novelist Walter Kirn is insightful enough to point out that the word ‘toy’ is both a noun and a verb. As such he zeroes in on a crucial aspect of Mr. Levinthal’s work. Toys are specifically those artifacts that children use to ‘toy’ with their ideas about the adult world, whether it be the world of romance, adventure or combat.

As such, Mr. Levinthal has succeeded in obsessively creating a moving opus that confronts the pop culture, the myths and the trauma that continue to linger in the American psyche around the Vietnam war. Not a portrayal, but a ritual re-enactment, if not an exorcism of sorts. It is play at the very highest level.

Mr. Levinthal recalls the moment when he received some initial feedback on the first images from his collaborator, Vietnam veteran E. Patrick Gallagher.  

“He told me, ‘looking at these last images, I feel like I’m back there….this is Vietnam.’ It gave me chills.” WM