I’m not sure I find Leni Riefenstahl’s photography compositionally very interesting. I feel as if I have seen many of these images before, whether in Greek statue, or sport and “anthropological” photography. But perhaps this the point of her importance as a photographer; she made advances in how photographs were taken, especially of moving bodies, so that her innovation has now become the norm. One of her Olympia photographs (below) that I find intriguing is completely unlike the others in that it hides the whole form of the body and abstracts the sky with the absence of dramatic clouds and the dark surface cutting across the top.
As far as the Nuba series, they are informative documentary photos, if all you are looking for is representations of visual culture, but there are more compelling documentary photographs out there. I think it is the subjects that are intriguing in the photographs and not the photograph itself. I find it interesting that she said “to explain the absence of imperfect specimens from her gallery, she later told an interviewer that old, ugly or disabled Nuba hid themselves in shame.” Is this really true? Or was she making aesthetic or idealistic choices? Also I hope the text accompanying the photographs are just bad translations, because otherwise it is fairly condescending.
Still you’ve got to hand it to her for being a stubborn and persistent woman. As Judith Thurman wrote in the New Yorker article, she had a narcissistic self-assurance, and a denial for her admiration of Hitler, for which she was criticized (along with producing other Nazi-related film), would have “endanger[ed] the ruthless suspension of self-doubt that her identity had, from childhood, depended on.” So she stuck to her guns on all matters, which makes her a model of a feminist woman. She was exceptional in her time for her talent and determination to not let being a woman stop her, even if she did use her beauty as her means of advancement. So whatever the controversy and mythology surrounding her, there is no denying she was influential. Had she made her photography and film in another time, perhaps we could be more dismissive as well as reproachful, but the fact that she lived over one hundred years with so many stages in her life is impressive and telling of how much history and change has happened in the last century. Commanding women will always have my respect for their advances in pushing and redefining gender, but in this case it is a little hard to separate the woman from the tainted character.
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