Stellar-Somerset Gallery has set up a retrospective of photographer David Levinthal‘s work.

In 1977 Levinthal collaborated with Garry Trudeau on a book titled Hitler Moves East. Long out of print, the book staged toy soldiers to give an account of the Nazis’ Eastern Front campaign. “When the book came out,” Levinthal said, “so many people looked at the pictures and thought they were actual war photographs. Bookstores initially put it in the history section.”

Later series — especially Barbie, The Wild West and Baseball — look just like pictures of toys.

Levinthal has collected toys and models for years to use them in photographs, leading him to extremes. Ten years ago, the UC Berkeley Art Museum presented the Mein Kampf series that uses toy Nazis found in Germany to envision scenes of the Holocaust and other atrocities.

For his XXX series, Levinthal used sex dolls, no more than a foot tall, with trappings that suggest some SM activities. Using a large-format Polaroid camera, he gave them a creepy hyperreality with soft focus, cropping and ambiguous scale.

David Levinthal: Thirty Years of Photographs, 1974-2004. Through May 27. Stellar-Somerset Gallery, Palo Alto.

Via SF Gate.