While Riefenstahl celebrated her birthday with such guests as tennis star Boris Becker and animal trainers Siegfried and Roy, the high-end publisher Taschen commemorated it with an imposing collection (580 pages, 13.4 by 19.7 inches) of the still photos she’s taken in Africa since the 1960s. In matters of race, at least, she dissented from Nazi orthodoxy–her 1938 film “Olympia” riskily celebrated the black American athlete Jesse Owens–and her lustrous pictures of naked, painted African hardbodies may be her least troublesome legacy. Still, it’s long been noted that these stern and statuelike portraits look like jut-jawed ubermenschen of color, and that there’s a pitiless edge to their nobility. Would we note that if Riefenstahl’s name weren’t attached? Maybe in another hundred years we’ll have enough distance to look at them clearly.
