With Dana’s work, one cannot help but be mesmerized by her ability to capture people in situ. Her career has been broadly defined by her portrait work, both commercially and for her own personal subjectivity. Whereas having a career built on poraiture no doubt inspires a healthy relationship with the craft of photography, there is something extra sensory concerning her work that first sprung to mind in the popular consciousness with her imitable book Imperial Courts (Roma, 2015), a photobook that highlights the denizens of the eponymous houseing project in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles from 1993-2015. The project, shot over decades, shows a tender, beautifully rendered catalog of the neighborhood. The portraits radiate life amongst a challenging period in Los Angeles, which had its beginning marked by Rodney King’s brutality at the hands of the police. What Dana was able to accomplish, through all of the rancor and media blitz on the neighborhood, its resulting riots, and its clear capacity to misunderstand the point of its citizens’ plight, is something ethereal, quiet, and dignified.
What other historians have found in Mike Disfarmer’s work and his Dust Bowl-era portraits, I see in Imperial Courts, Dana’s widely celebrated book. Disfarmer, a studio photographer from Indiana, has been heralded as a master of the vernacular tradition of portrait making, with claims suggesting that his simple, often sparse studio portraits enable his sitters to be seen as monumental and angelic, and a kind and compassionate gaze settles over the shoulders and halos of his subjects. Whereas I tend to argue that they are great images, they are not substantially above many studios’ output of the period. Marketing sometimes enables the dream. The reason I mention this is that, with Dana’s Imperial Courts and her work in general, I find her ability to pull the humanity from her subjects into frame a powerful tool. Like the apocrypha surrounding Disfarmer, she lifts her subjects to center stage gracefully and gives them a dignified countenance that is often lost in portraiture. Dignity is the essential word.
It is not easy to make this kind of work, and it relies heavily on investing emotion, clarity of vision, and technical skill, all of which must come together to bring portraits like this to light. Judith Joy Ross, Thomas Boivin, and Mark Steinmetz are other examples of contemporary photographers who I feel understand this motivation. Dana’s work, the work that lies to the side of her equally brilliant commercial work, hits a little differently. Perhaps it is the time it takes to make the work or her proximity and duration with the subjects, but, generally speaking, the work is consistent and is also amplified in her personal projects. I believe that her work is direct, but leaves a positive imprint on the viewer. For me, someone who is not overly concerned with portraiture, I find artists like Dana and those I have mentioned can break through hardened walls and let light in, and challenge the viewer to read the portraits they make through a very human lens. What is reflected sometimes says more about the viewer’s ability to adapt to the images than the images themselves.
With all of that in mind, I think her new book, De Wallen Amsterdam (Roma, 2025), continues those terms while also introducing a curious change of location. I mention it because I am accustomed to Dana’s work being American in some ways, though knowing full well that she is Dutch. Finding her new body of work, which began during Covid, is refreshing, as it exemplifies another close geography for her and shows in the work. It is also a return of sorts. Dana, having left America to return to Amsterdam, has begun working in the De Wallen district, an area known worldwide and in popular consciousness as the Red Light District. Growing up in America, in the Midwest, the reputation of De Wallen had made its way to me long before I set foot in Europe, and when I first made my way to its shores (of sorts), I remember thinking that it was not at all what I had imagined. After smoking a joint and seeing the first sex club, it all fell apart, but this was in the 2000s. Much had already changed from the De Wallen of the 70s, the one in popular consciousness, with the raucous side of the wild life being coralled into tighter areas and with all seediness giving way to sex tourism, giving way to starbucks, giving way to, like every city, the complete selling out of its indigienous habitants with property over evaluation and the capital cleansing of the marginal from city streets.
De Wallen, as Dana testifies, is still there. It still hosts clubs, sex workers, and drugs, but it is a much tamer image than we were previously sold. It is lit up with British stag dos, expensive boutiques, and corporate storefronts eating at its edges. What cities consider progressive often act as a double-edged sword. On one hand, the sanitization means not stepping on needles or human shit, on the other, it means whitewashing whole sections of authentic city life away. I suspect the slow erasure of De Wallen is part of the reason that Dana has found this subject matter interesting. She also has deep ties to the area. Her father, an artist, kept a studio there, and Dana has lived around its quarters over time. She has seen the change of this curious section of the city, and she has seen its slide away from authenticity toward a monocultural divide. Having been away in America as long as she has been, I also suspect there is a feeling of prodigal daughter-ness to the project. Coming back to assess, address her roots, and make work that reflects a new/old chapter in her life must inform some of the work. The project’s casual familiarity, coupled with the desire to document what is current before it all changes. There is a notion of acceptance in the work, and a testament to the city she grew up in that makes it appealing on the local level, but, more broadly, conditions a response about how we’ve become dislocated from our fellow travellers. Imagine holding a large-format camera and communicating that you want to take someone’s picture in 2025. It seems easy, right? First, explain the camera, then the intention, ask someone to perform a posture or pose, then exchange info, and hope it all worked out. I don’t have that gumption left in me.
From a technical and sequence-oriented perspective, it is no surprise that De Wallen is another significant collaboration with Roma Publications. I really love what they do. There is a minimal, almost stark approach to many of their books, and they hit on different levels. In the case of De Wallen, the type on the cover serves to sequester the warmth of the portraits within like walls. Its gray boards read as quiet and even a little emotionless, which is immediately offset by what is found inside. In this, there is warmth between the covers that adds layers to the work itself. In terms of sequence, what is really alluring here is that these beautiful portraits are offset at intervals by Dana’s magnificent interior images of bars, cafes, off-license shops, and the occasional brothel, denoted by baby oil, copious, Diddy-like amount of baby oil warming on the radiator-sorry, couldn’t resist. The saturation of the photos adds to the layers of information they represent. They are not dingy, backroomy, but are instead individual cornucopias of 21st-century information, leading us through the extended geography in which they find themselves situated. I find myself forensically observing the details.
Finally, at the end of the book is a eloquent passage of what I imagine to be still frames from a video of a man singing, people posing, amongst other goings on around De Wallen, bringing a less static description of the place, laid out in multiple images on the page, giving the reader a way to cinematically interpret the body of work, which leaves me with a sense of the ephemeral. I love the interplay between the stillness of the black-and-white portraits and these, albeit frozen, more movement-oriented stills. They speak volumes about the environment, and you can almost hear them. I may actually prefer De Wallen to Dana’s other books because it begins slightly differently and because I live, as an American, in Europe. Somehow I understand its proximity, but do not feel it as familiar. I find it something like a memory during a time of incredible flux, though it is not my memory. I think it suggests a calm before a gathering storm —and what that storm brings, only time will tell—highly recommended.
Dana Lixenberg
De Wallen Amsterdam
Roma Publications