Filmmaker and photographer · Sudan
Leni Riefenstahl
Leni Riefenstahl (1902–2003) was a German film director best known for Nazi propaganda films, above all Triumph of the Will (1935). She is not an African artist. She appears here because from the 1960s she photographed the Nuba of southern Sudan, published the bestselling books Die Nuba (1973) and Die Nuba von Kau (1976) — photographs that critics have argued carry the same aesthetic as her Nazi-era films.
Updated 2 min read
Riefenstahl made her name in the 1930s as a director for the Nazi regime. Triumph of the Will, her film of the 1934 Nazi Party rally, is one of the most notorious propaganda films ever made. After the war she was classified by a denazification tribunal as a "fellow traveller", and she spent the rest of her life denying that she had known of Nazi crimes.
In the 1960s she turned to Africa. With special permission from the Sudanese government, she made repeated journeys to the Nuba Mountains between 1962 and 1977 and photographed Nuba communities, their wrestling, body painting and ceremonies. Die Nuba (1973), published in English in 1974 as The Last of the Nuba, was an international bestseller, followed by Die Nuba von Kau (1976; The People of Kau), which turned to a different Nuba group in the south-east of the mountains.
The photographs have been fiercely criticised. In her essay "Fascinating Fascism", published in the New York Review of Books on 6 February 1975, Susan Sontag called the book the third in Riefenstahl's "triptych of fascist visuals" and argued that its photographs share the cult of the strong, beautiful body found in the Nazi films, and that the author's own account of herself was misleading. Riefenstahl answered Sontag in a chapter of her memoir; others have described a colonial gaze that froze living people into an "untouched" past. A research project called Nuba Images, run by the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin with Sudanese scholars and artists, studies the estate, which one report puts at about 10,000 photographs and films; a Sudanese researcher pointed out that the people photographed did not know what she would do with the pictures. The project was brought almost to a standstill by the war that began in Sudan on 15 April 2023.
How to look at the Nuba pictures: ask who is posed and who decides. Set Sontag's reading beside the Sudanese researchers' questions about consent and what the pictures left out, and compare the images with what the people themselves said, where the research project makes that available. That reading is this site's own.
Where to see the work
The Nuba Images project's site explains the archive and its research, and Sontag's essay is widely reprinted. The Nuba photographs were published as books; we have not confirmed a current museum display.
For photography made by Africans of their own countries, see African photography and our list of African photographers.
