David Levinthal’s Vietnam, published by Kehrer Verlag in 2024, approaches the war not through battlefield archives but through photographs of staged figures and dioramas. The conflict appears at a deliberate remove: reconstructed, compressed and subjected to photographic transformation. Its subject is therefore twofold—the war itself and the visual conventions through which it has entered American memory.

Levinthal works with the imagery accumulated around Vietnam, particularly its afterlife in popular culture. Films such as Platoon and Full Metal Jacket form part of the book’s imaginative background, alongside the photographer’s own memories of the period. Rather than treating cinematic images as historical authorities, he examines how spectacle, recollection and representation become entangled, and how mediated scenes can acquire the emotional force of remembered events.

The project also returns to Hitler Moves East, Levinthal’s earlier collaboration with Garry Trudeau, made as the United States was withdrawing from Vietnam. By placing the new photographs in dialogue with that formative work, the book connects two moments in Levinthal’s sustained use of constructed scenes to consider war. Written contributions by novelist Bernard-Henri Lévy and art historian and curator Lisa Hostetler broaden the discussion toward the conflict’s effects on geopolitical assumptions, the American psyche, social relations and mass media.

Across 156 pages, Vietnam presents a concentrated study of how photographs can manufacture proximity while making their own artifice visible. For collectors concerned with staged photography, representations of conflict or the interaction between photographic practice and mass culture, the book merits attention for the precision of that inquiry. It is not a documentary account of Vietnam, but an examination of the images through which the war continues to be pictured and psychologically inhabited.