Photography as a Form of Literature
Interview with Critical Mass 2025 Top 50 Photographer Drew Leventhal
Over the course of seven years, Drew Leventhal photographed Mason & Dixon, a series of images investigating patriotic memory, American landscapes, and performances of violence along the border between Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware. First inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s novel of the same title, Leventhal was interested in documenting the unseen borders and barriers that define American mythologies. Largely informed by his background in anthropology, Leventhal uses photographic language as a narrative tool for creating stories about tradition, place, memory. His images from the series were selected as part of the 2025 Critical Mass Top 50, and his submission portfolio can be viewed here.
In this interview with Sofia Rivera, Leventhal speaks about his creative process, his recent Fulbright award in Ireland, and his advice for young photographers navigating the art world.
By Sofia Rivera
Sofia Rivera: Can you talk a bit about your background and how you came to photography?
Drew Leventhal: There’s two versions of the story, one is that I’ve been photographing my entire life. There are pictures of me out in the field with my parents, who were anthropologists, from when I was maybe two or three years old with a little Polaroid camera in my hand. Essentially, I’ve been photographing since I was a tiny little kid. The other part of the story, though, is I never called myself a photographer or really took it seriously until much later on. Sometimes we hear these interviews where people share that moment of revelation where they get to the dark room and print a picture for the first time and go, “My God, I found my calling in life,” but that never happened to me. Photography was always something that I did in the background, it was a slow burn, something I had to work at a lot more to figure out that I actually really enjoyed it and that it was the thing that I wanted to do with my life. I didn’t really take it seriously until about seven, maybe eight, years ago, when I graduated from undergrad and then went to ICP in New York. There are so many ways to approach the medium and fall in love with it, you don’t have to have this one moment of revelation, sometimes it’s a grind.
SR: Was ICP your entryway into really learning about the medium and all the technical processes? What exactly was the program you were doing there?
DL: Yeah, it was the one year program, so I did the one year certificate. I’d been shooting film in college and digital pictures my whole life, but it definitely was a step up in two ways. One was technically getting really serious, like large format photography. Then the second was just thinking about photography, and it pushed me to consider the medium in a way that was deeper and more meaningful than I had before. Before ICP, I was taking pictures of my friends, and trees and sunsets, and whatever, it was fun. But during the program, and then after, it really taught me about photography as this beautiful art form that can really be super expressive and can share lots of stories and storytelling. Then I started reading photography theory and engaging with people who were thinking deeply about this medium and giving it form and credence in a way that I hadn’t experienced before. So, yeah, ICP is definitely the part where I started taking it seriously.
SR: I was looking through the Critical Mass portfolio that you submitted, and I saw a lot of images that evoked Robert Capa, Roger Fenton, Dorothea Lang, Alfred Stieglitz with the clouds, and An-My Lê. I’m curious about your photographic influences, can you speak on that?
DL: Well, you just named a bunch of them right there. I thought to myself when I was shooting these World War II reenactment images, “I’m like Robert Capa right now, but I’m not actually getting shot at!” That’s a much better way of doing it. Dorothea Lange is probably my favorite photographer, I just love her work. It was so expressive at a time when it wasn’t really the norm to do that. And also, the way she was going out and engaging with the world was very anthropological, which is really important to me and my background. The camera she uses, that big graflex 4 by 5 camera, is the same one I use a lot of the time. You also mentioned An-My Lê, who I absolutely adore. I love her work so much, it’s all about the military, the militarization of landscape, and the performance of violence. When I was walking around photographing the Mason-Dixon line, that’s what I was experiencing, too.
Off the top of my head, another photographer who’s influenced my work is Curran Hatleberg. His work is also very anthological and rooted in place and community. There’s this anthropological term called “participant observation,” where you’re supposed to go out in the world and engage with it. As an apologist, we use our words to describe what we’re seeing, but as a photographer we’re making images about it. Curran Hatleberg is doing that in a really beautiful way, where he’s both participating in the world, going into these communities, and living there, because he’s teaching, or because he has friends there, and family there. That kind of insider-outsider perspective is a really beautiful place to be because you get a little bit of both, but not the whole picture of either. I can send you some more names, but I have to think about it a little more.
[Drew shared the following names via email: Carleton Watkins, Timothy O’Sullivan, Robert Frank, Bryan Schutmaat, Matthew Genitempo, Curran Hatleberg, RaMell Ross, Brian Ulrich, Susan Lipper, Carolyn Drake, Kristine Potter, Deana Lawson, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Bill Henson, Daido Moriyama, Kohei Yoshiyuki, Jacob Aue Sobol, and Francesca Woodman.]
Part of the reason I wanted to photograph in black and white is because I wanted to be in dialogue with all of these older photographers. They were seeing the same things I was seeing in the last five years, and I was thinking about how much things have changed as much as they haven’t changed at all. I was jokingly getting critiqued on some of my images, where I’d hear “this is your Dorothea Lange picture,” or “this is your Lee Friedlander,” and I’m not doing it intentionally, but I am trying to put myself in conversation with the great American photographers. I know I’m not as good as them, but going back to the same point of how things have and haven’t changed in America, I’m interested in putting in dialogue what people were seeing 100 years ago and 50 years ago with what I was seeing in Pennsylvania and Maryland.
SR: Your Mason & Dixon series was recently part of the Griffin Museum of Art’s photography show Manifest Destiny. I’m curious what it’s been like to see the success of this body of work?
DL: It has been a weird, long journey. I get a lot of my ideas through reading and literature, and the project started with a book by one of my favorite authors, Thomas Pynchon, called Mason & Dixon. It’s kind of a weird, alternative history about the surveying of the Mason-Dixon line in the 1750s. It’s devilishly funny and mystical and witty and sad, and all these different things. My original idea for this project, six or seven years ago, was I wanted to illustrate the book and give it form through photographs. That idea quickly changed, but I discovered I was still visually interested in this boundary, this barrier, that is so hard to find and so hard to see. For five years I was just wandering and photographing it and getting critiques in grad school at RISD, but it’s totally changed over the years. When I first started I was shooting a lot of large format, photographing the landscape and a lot of strangers, but over the last couple of years as the project developed I really changed my visual language. I started using smaller format, medium, 35mm, Super 8 film. So, part of the challenge on the tail end was smashing it all together and making it make sense. Putting it together and giving it form for the Griffin Museum kind of felt like a really good stopping point for the project, and now I’m done photographing it. To see it go from me wandering around in the fields of Pennsylvania all summer, hot and sticky, to being able to see my images on the wall has given me great joy. As artists, we all feel this imposter syndrome, this “What am I doing?” But having a show like that and giving it a form that I’m proud of –the printing and the framing, I’m especially proud of that– made it feel very real and hopefully makes it feel real to the people who see it as well.
SR: You’ve talked about your work as based in “microhistories” that you use to represent larger trends, such as in your Yosh series. I’m curious about your process for choosing narratives and what factors play a role in your final selection?
DL: For Yosh, I did start with one family, small in scale and intimate, that spoke to larger issues of colonialism and family and memory and landscapes and all these different things, but “microhistories” might be a bit misleading for my practice as a whole. I think all stories that you tell are representative bodies. For example, it’s really hard to make a book that attempts to take down capitalism or tries to address all the world’s societal ills, but it’s much easier to make a story or a body of work about one family, one street corner, one place, city, or action. You can make a wavy, curvy, weird line toward those ideas you were hoping to talk about, but it’s not so overwhelming that the photographer or the artists can’t get a hold on it. You can get a hold on things that are smaller or more intimate, and they actually illuminate a lot of the tension and a lot of the coping strategies that people use to make their way through a world that is controlled by these bigger forces. This is the same thing in Anthropology, right? We take things that are sort of smaller, more intimate actions or symbols, structures, dances, what have you, and we extrapolate. We ask, “What is this actually saying about how the society views x, y, z?” and that’s similar to what I’m doing in photography. I’m trying to understand how and why people do the things they do and the forces acting upon them.
SR: Can you talk more about your current Fulbright project in Ireland, how you came to the narrative you’re working on now?
DL: The stuff in Ireland has changed so much since I applied. I was initially working with the traveling community, but in the last few months I’ve pivoted away from it purely logistically. Nothing bad happened, it was great, everyone was nice and kind, but it was just one of those things where there was a lot of friction. It was slow moving, I wasn’t getting much done, and I’m only here for a year, so I pivoted away from it and am working on landscape-oriented projects.
SR: I often visited Photo Museum Ireland when I was living in Dublin. I’m curious about how the specific environment has impacted your focus: are you drawing from any specific Irish influences, even if your project has changed?
DL: Absolutely. Part of the reason I wanted to come here was because the country has a very unique relationship with the photographic medium, it’s actually one of the earliest countries photography was brought to in the 1830s and 40s. From the beginning, photography was used to control the meaning of the landscape in Ireland. Early on you would get these pictures made by very wealthy Anglo-Irish people of landscapes, poor tenant farmers, etc. Then you’d get these gaudy National Geographic-style photographs, those bright greens and blues, of the landscape as this beautiful place to visit. Then you have pictures of the 60s and 70s, The Troubles, gritty black and white, a landscape controlled by violence, and then images up to today. I was interested in how Irish travelers, and Ireland in general, have been portrayed, and the relationship to landscape throughout these narratives.
I have started taking my own pictures of the coast, using a custom-made glass pinhole camera that my wife gave me. It was interesting trying to photograph this landscape that’s been done so many times before, and fun to almost succeed in giving it a different language, and entering again in that dialogue of how the landscape has been imaged and controlled and mythologized over time. It’s a wildly influential landscape for photography. There’s so many people who have made images here, like Tony O’shea and Paul Seawright, and there’s a lot of photography going on today.
SR: In past interviews, you’ve talked about using “fictionality” in photography. I’m curious what inspires you to blur fiction and reality through photography, and how you think the medium lends itself to that?
DL: I think photographers have gotten really caught up in the dichotomous scale between truth and total nonsense and fiction. Photographs are somewhere in the middle of that scale, and I think we would be a lot better off if we just embraced that photographs are not at all true and there’s no sense of reality in them.
I was recently reading an anthropologist who was arguing that if we embrace that what we’re saying with photographs is completely subjective and not at all rooted in the truth–we’re framing and choosing and deciding the moment and how the picture is made and all these different things–it’s devoid of objective truth. But I think we can best represent what’s happening in the world even if it’s not the truth; we can represent what we see or what we’re observing a lot better if we just embrace that what we’re doing is basically a form of literature instead of a form of documentation. I inscribe no truth value to any of the pictures I take. They’re not “true,” I don’t even know what “true” means. But I do see them as a form of storytelling, a form of narrative, and my personal understanding of how I’m seeing the world and what I’m seeing happen in it.
There’s a Szarkowski dichotomy of the window and the mirror, where photographs are either a window onto the world or a mirror aimed back at the photographer. I think that’s a bit simplistic and I don’t fully agree with that. I think that images are a dialogue, a relationship between myself, the person being photographed or the landscape being photographed, and the viewer later on. It’s in that dialogue, that relationship, where we learn about who we are as people. Stories are being told, and the photograph is given meaning only through that dialogue.
SR: I’m intrigued by this idea of your photographs as literature versus a strict form of documentation. I always think about subjectivity, in documentary films or in documentary photography, where the viewer can kind of get wrapped up in it and forget that it’s still a constructed narrative.
DL: And it’s a narrative that, importantly, each viewer is going to see differently, right? And so the meaning of the photograph is ever changing, because the viewer is ever changing as well. So, yeah, I think this idea of truth is fluctuating and just changing all the time. I think the meaning of photographs is rooted in discussion and dialogue.
SR: In terms of your style, I had a question about how you navigate standing out in such an image-saturated world. Everyone’s looking at photographs all the time now, willingly or unwillingly, and I’m wondering how you think about standing out when you’re making images, or if it’s something you’re thinking about at all?
DL: Yeah, I am thinking about it, but also trying not to. I’m trying to look at less images, which means not being online as much. But I’m thinking about the types of images that are really popular and are shared widely, and then I’m running the opposite direction. For me, those pictures are simple, and it’s not an AI thing, it’s just a broad thing. I’ve been trying to make pictures that are very different, and so my language has changed. I’ve gone from large format, all the way down to Super 8 film, the biggest to the smallest, and now I’m working with experimental pinhole cameras and little box cameras and stuff like that, and it’s much more fun that way, it’s a lot looser. My style, even for Mason & Dixon and Yosh, has changed significantly. I’m not worried about sharpness, image quality, length quality, all this different stuff; I’m more interested in the engagement with the world through photography than I am with what the sharpest, most beautiful, most perfect result is.
SR: In addition to being part of the 2025 Critical Mass Top 50, you’ve been granted awards by Lenscratch and National Geographic, and have been a finalist for the Aperture Portfolio Prize and the PhMuseum Grant. I’m curious what advice you have for early-career photographers navigating the art world?
DL: I would say it’s really good to take influence from other photographers. You should be looking at photobooks all the time, you should be learning about new photographers, you should be researching. What you shouldn’t be doing is spending hours and hours scrolling Instagram, because those pictures are so different, and you’re not getting any of the context of why the pictures were made, why they’re important, or how they fit into a larger body of work, you’re just in this instant dopamine hit. The other thing is to make a lot of pictures. If one of every 100 photographs you take is incredible and amazing, that’s still an image to be proud of. For me, it’s a patience game, it is quantity, it is shooting a lot, looking at a lot of different things. Also, I’d recommend learning your influences and not being afraid of them. When I was young, I wish that I had known that just because somebody is doing something really well doesn’t mean you can’t do something similar.
For applying to things, I also think about quantitative quality. Apply for a lot of different things, and you might get rejected, and it hurts, but we all get rejected. What distinguishes those who quit from those who go on to have long, great careers, is they were able to wallow for a night, and then get out the next day, and go take some more pictures. Don’t see these rejections as personal affronts, like your work isn’t good, it just means that the person didn’t see it the way you wanted it to be seen.
In terms of other professional practices, I am a big fan of grad school, a big proponent of critique groups, and talking to people about your photographs. Without that kind of dialogue, you can’t really grow much as an artist. Things like Aperture, Lenscratch, and local and regional critique groups are really, really helpful. And if you can’t find one, set it up yourself.
SR: Do you have any projects on the horizon, especially as you’re looking beyond Ireland? What stories are you hoping to tell next?
DL: Yeah, I have a whole Notes App list of potential projects. Any photographer will probably have three projects on the back burner, at any given moment, and they all stem from the last one. The next one I’m working on after Ireland is probably going to be in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. There’s a lot of really cool mythology and mystical, kind of witchy occult stuff going on there. It’s also interesting because it’s in the super crowded area between New York and Philadelphia, kind of an empty hole in the biggest metropolitan area in the country. So for my next project, I’m basically going out and hunting the Jersey Devil.
Drew Leventhal is a photographer interested in colonial history, family, and the way memory shapes identity. He was part of Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50 in 2025, and his submission can be viewed here.
Sofia Rivera is a 2026 Critical Mass Intern pursuing an Art History MA from Hunter College, CUNY. She has held research and curatorial positions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Columbia Journalism School, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
