Modern Romance

New book, never used.

In the mid-80s, David Levinthal worked on the body of work that would become the defining art of his career. Using only a Polaroid SX70 camera, he created a series of tableaux set-ups depicting an American world of the 40s and 50s reminiscent of Edward Hopper & classic film noir. These scenes of solitary characters, in dimly lit restaurants and hotels, by swimming pools and on street corners, transcend their toy figure composition and childlike scale to become atmospheric, adult scenarios, heavy with the search for romance in a hostile, lonely environment. While selections of this series have been published in various books, this is the first time a whole book has been devoted to these important images, many of which have not been published previously. Accompanying the images is an essay by acclaimed photographer and photo historian Eugenia Parry.

Modern Romance is secretive, illicit. A woman stands under a street lamp. She is (a) waiting for her husband, (b) waiting for her lover, (c) waiting for a customer, (d) waiting, (e) all of the above. Roger Rosenblatt Levinthal questions how much we substitute image for actuality Eric P. Nash, The New York Times