Dana Lixenberg has a personal connection to De Wallen: she spent part of her childhood in that neighborhood and knows the narrow streets not only through an outsider's eye. When the Stadsarchief asked her to make a photographic project about Amsterdam, she deliberately chose this heart of the city.
Between 2021 and 2025, she immersed herself in the microcosm of De Wallen: residents, sex workers, students, entrepreneurs and artists. She observed without judgment and captured moments that often remain invisible. The result is a combination of intimate black-and-white portraits and monumental color photographs of interiors, combined with a video installation that fuses space, silence and presence.
The exhibition not only shows faces, but shows how connection and tension coexist. The Red Light District is a neighborhood where tourism, commerce, living and working constantly collide. Lixenberg captures those collisions not as spectacle, but as gentle, shaking moments: a glance, a door, a window with insulation, but also a conversation, a back, a family photo in a room. The silence in a hallway speaks louder than any sign.
In the Salon Room (Exhibition Hall) of the Stadsarchief, a spatial interplay between photograph, light and shadow emerges. The installation invites you to slow down: not through rest, but through attention. You see not only what the camera recorded, but what takes place behind the surface.
"The exhibition turns a busy neighborhood into a quiet place to really look."
"The Red Light District" proves again that a neighborhood is not defined by simplistic images, but by continuity, relationships and nuance. Lixenberg invites you to listen: to light, to spaces, to life going on.