Untitled, from the series Hitler Moves East

Shortly after graduating from the Yale School of Art and Architecture, David Levinthal produced a series of photographs published in book form as iHitler Moves East, with text provided by his classmate Garry Trudeau (later of Doonesbury fame). Employing toy soldiers and painstakingly crafted miniature sets, Levinthal re-staged for the camera the German army’s tragic campaigns into the Soviet Union in 1941-43, which resulted not only in millions of casualties, but also contributed to the army’s defeat and the eventual collapse of the Third Reich. At first glance, the images perfectly mimic typical war photography, capturing soldiers in close-up and vistas of regiments on the move and in the midst of battle, dramatically shrouded in the fog of gunsmoke and poison gas.

Created at the height of the Vietnam War, Hitler Moves East pointedly raises questions about the distortions of photographic representation, the (im)possibilities of re-enactment, and the role imagination plays in the production of historical knowledge. The images are ambivalent in the way documentary photography often is, leading one critic to characterize the series as “a serious chronicle of war and a sympathetic—even moving—portrayal of the soldier’s hopeless stoicism.”