Customer Reviews

I.E.D.: War in Afghanistan and Iraq

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I have always enjoyed David Levinthal's work. But there is no bang or horror to these photos. The book suffers from to much repetition. A hand full of photos are great, but that's it. If you're a fan of David's work , I'm sure you will buy the book to have in your collection. I was not impressed.

David Levinthal's photographic examination of the Iraqi War, using toy soldiers, is a unique diversion uniting photography and art and reality. Too much of the photographic arts are epiphanies or still images captured from a unique angle. Nothing more. Then there is the journalistic photography that is the opposite, it attempts to capture the totality of the event (A politician with head lowered after defeat). Levinthal shows the absurdity of both forms in "I.E.D.." Here toy soldiers are placed in still images and photographed in blurry motion as if in real action. To some degree there are so many plays on images that as you read the book, which is a short history of a troop of soldiers on tour in Iraq in real life, you are jolted back when looking at the next photo. The approach is not as good as it was "Hitler Moves East," which gave haunting real-life soldiers fighting on the Eastern Front during World War II. However, David Levinthal creates these photos with a sense of not tricking the reader but illuminating the point that photography is a deconstructive artform still evolving.