DAVID LEVINTHAL Untitled from the series American Beauties #12 (Hula Dancer), 1989 Polaroid print, ed. of 5 24 x 20 inches Retail Value: $6,300 Courtesy of HuiPress, Maui, Hawaii

David Levinthal was born in 1949 in San Francisco and currently lives and works in New York City. He received his BA in Studio Art from Stanford University and his MFA in Photography from Yale University. His work in photography, included in numerous solo and group exhibitions, has also been supported by grants from the Polaroid Corporation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

All of Levinthal’s series of photo works are thought to allude to familiar childhood and movieworld environments; they are caught up one way or another in the American mythos. They constitute a strange amalgam of childhood innocence (through the use of toy figures) and adult experience (through the erotic nature of those figures.) The soft-focus figure of a hula dancer, bare-breasted and wearing an improbably short skirt, is posed in a strange liminal space, between sand and shadow, like a postmodern pin-up.