Fine Art Fetish Friday

A serious post this week…

Are you familiar with Leni Riefenstahl? A simultaneously brilliant, fascinating and horrifying woman. She was a German movie star in the silent film days, starring in sexy films about beautiful young women climbing snowy mountain peaks. She directed one such film herself and caught the attention of Germany’s new leader in the 1930s. He commissioned her to make a propaganda film about a political rally in Nuremberg. The movie, Triumph of the Will, along with a later documentary on the 1936 Berlin Olympics, introduced a wide range of new film techniques, including mounting cameras on rails and cranes. Images of athletes outlined against the sky, filmed by a low mounted camera, became visual icons. Artistically brilliant, the propaganda nature of the films can make them difficult to watch today.

After the war, she became an outcast because of her political affiliations during that time. In the 1970s she traveled to the Sudan to photograph the Nuba tribe. Many thought her work was brilliant. Others thought it was fetishized. And others thought it even worse—somehow continuing a world view that idolized physical perfection, even if it wasn’t Aryan.

Here are some of her photos of the Nuba, and some photos of her among working there. What do you think?