David Levinthal’s Mein Kampf examines the representation of Nazi power and the Holocaust through photographs of constructed scenes. Toy soldiers, dolls and other figurines become the actors in tableaux addressing Hitler’s rise and the persecution and murder of Jews. The deliberately charged title belongs here to a photographic investigation of historical imagery. The objects are miniature substitutes, and the distance between those objects and the events they evoke is central to encountering the work.

Levinthal makes the small scale of his materials serve a much larger subject. Soft focus complicates recognition: a viewer can identify a familiar visual vocabulary while remaining conscious of the scene’s fabrication. These are photographs made from arrangements of objects rather than photographs taken at the historical events. That distinction gives the work its tension, inviting attention to how lighting, framing and selective visibility can make a constructed image appear convincing.

Published by Twin Palms in 1997, this English-language hardcover measures approximately 11 by 13 inches and contains 88 pages. Its 56 color plates give the photographic series a substantial printed setting. The large page brings the miniature tableaux into a different physical relationship with the reader, allowing a small figure or group to occupy a significant part of the field of vision.

Reading the book means negotiating the gap between a recognizable image and the evidence it can provide. The figures cannot stand in for the testimony of people who experienced the Holocaust; instead, the photographs open questions about mediated memory and the visual conventions through which history is recalled. As an object, the book gathers those questions into a sequence that can be revisited, with the artificiality of the scenes remaining visible alongside their disturbing historical references.