Leni Riefenstahl. Africa

One of the early plates holds a single Nuba wrestler, skin dusted pale with wood ash, arms raised, the low Sudanese light raking across him until the body reads as carved rather than lived in. By any measure of light, form, and timing it is a beautiful photograph. The discomfort arrives before you can enjoy it, because you already know whose eye framed it.

Leni Riefenstahl made these pictures across the 1960s and 1970s, living for months at a stretch among the Nuba of Sudan, and they reached print first in The Last of the Nuba and The People of Kau before this larger survey drew her African work together. Susan Sontag's essay "Fascinating Fascism" named the trouble plainly: the sensibility that shot Triumph of the Will and Olympia had found, in these bodies, an ideal of physical perfection, the strong displayed over the weak, vitality held in reserve like a promise. That reading has trailed the work for half a century. It should. Looking at these plates while pretending not to know is neither possible nor honest.

And still the craft is undeniable. The ash-and-oil surfaces of the Southeast Nuba, the exact instant a wrestler's weight begins to shift, the graphic force of a composition built around one lifted arm: Riefenstahl saw all of it with a sharpness most documentarians never reach. Her color is disciplined, never candied. Her instinct for when to release the shutter, honed across decades in film, never deserts her. The wrestling bouts, the bracelet fights, the ceremonial crowds: she timed them the way she once timed an athlete breasting a finish line, always for the instant of greatest charge.

The People of Kau records something rarer still, a culture that made a fine art of the human surface: young men painting their faces into bold graphic masks, chalking and oiling their bodies for courtship dances and bracelet duels. Riefenstahl photographed this decoration as decoration, close in, frontal, lit to flatter. As a document of a practice now largely gone, the pictures carry genuine ethnographic weight. As a way of seeing people, they treat the Nuba much the way a fashion desk treats a season's new line.

TASCHEN prints all of it large, on heavy stock, in the saturated warmth the originals were made for. Scale is not neutral here. At this size the bodies acquire the air of monuments, and the monument is exactly what a viewer should distrust, since that same aesthetic is what first made Riefenstahl useful to a regime.

The trouble is that the clarity becomes the argument. When every subject is caught at a peak of strength and symmetry, the pictures stop describing a people and start proposing a hierarchy. A portrait photographer can still learn a great deal here about how raking light sculpts muscle and how patience earns a gesture. The same photographer has to register what the framing quietly leaves out: age, softness, illness, the ordinary, anything that might complicate the spectacle of the flawless. A portrait client is a whole person and not a physique, and holding onto that difference is most of the job.

So the volume asks to be held at arm's length, admired and resisted in a single motion. Beauty was never the problem. What beauty is recruited to carry is.

Return to the ash-dusted wrestler, arms lifted in the raking sun. The picture has not moved an inch. What you bring to it has, and Riefenstahl, of all photographers, is the one who makes that private negotiation impossible to set aside.