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History
From the beginning of his career, Levinthal has interrogated the relationship between history and myth. His most recent body of work, History, explores how popular culture influences the myths surrounding seminal moments in American life. The photographs reference events that span from the nation's founding through the Vietnam War, but are not preoccupied with facts or fidelity. Instead, the way figures are arranged and captured in these instantly recognizable scenes echoes mass media's endless recycling of imagery and reminds us that what we know of the recent and distant past is largely received secondhand from film, television, photojournalism, advertising, and even works of art. For Levinthal, history is the version of events that we come to understand and internalize as fact based on the influence of time, distance, memory, and popular media. |