Spike Lee Lights Camera Fantasy
Spike Lee Lights Camera Fantasy
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Print Size & Custom Framing
Print Size & Custom Framing
Listed dimensions refer to the image size. Each print includes an additional border around the image for matting and framing.
Optional matte black hardwood framing is available at checkout. Each frame is hand-crafted with museum-grade white mat board, UV-protected acrylic, and hanging hardware, and ships fully assembled.
Authenticity & Provenance
Authenticity & Provenance
Every print ships with a Certificate of Authenticity.
Depending on the work, prints may also carry an embossed archive seal, edition numbering, estate signature, or additional provenance records, as stated on the product page.
Shipping & Returns
Shipping & Returns
Unframed works typically ship within 1–2 business days in archival-safe packaging. Framed works are hand-assembled to order and require up to two weeks before dispatch. Tracking is provided once the order has been released for shipment.
Returns and cancellations are accepted within 24 hours of purchase. If your work arrives damaged, contact us and we will repair, replace where possible, or resolve the issue at no cost.
Lights, Camera, Fantasy: Spike Lee
Published in Playboy in January 2004, Lights, Camera, Fantasy: Spike Lee was conceived by Spike Lee and realized through David Levinthal's large-format Polaroid process. Drawing from an image in Lee's first feature, She's Gotta Have It, the work turns erotic fantasy into abstraction: bodies arranged as landscape, light, shadow, and form.
The collaboration was unusual in its making. Of the directors invited to create images for the magazine, Lee chose to direct the photographer rather than operate the camera himself, concentrating on what stood before the lens rather than the mechanics behind it. Levinthal, known for transforming charged subjects through the soft focus and scale of Polaroid, brought exactly the right hand to an image built on abstraction rather than display.
Playboy Photo Director Gary Cole singled out the result:
I think it is one of the strongest images in the portfolio.
In Lights, Camera, Fantasy: Spike Lee, six figures are posed close and overlapping, lit from above so that hips, shoulders, and curves rise and fall across the frame like dunes. Faces are largely withheld. The black-and-white tonality and the grain of the large-format Polaroid turn the bodies into a single sculptural surface, more topography than portrait.
Conceived by Lee, photographed by Levinthal, and preserved within the Playboy Legacy Collection, the work is part of the forty-eight-print archival edition released for Playboy's 50th anniversary.
Collection Note
The Playboy Legacy Collection was released in 2007 for the magazine's 50th anniversary as a forty-eight-print archival edition curated under the direction of Hugh Hefner. Each print is embossed with the archive seal bearing the Playboy Bunny mark and accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity.