Dana Lixenberg | Episode 95

Jul 1, 2025

Dana Lixenberg, a celebrated Dutch photographer, unveils her journey from Amsterdam to iconic portraiture. She shares the powerful impact of her long-term project, Imperial Courts, which challenges stereotypes in marginalized communities. Lixenberg recounts her intimate experiences photographing cultural icons like Tupac and Biggie, emphasizing the importance of trust and ethical responsibility in her work. She also discusses her poignant project, The Last Days of Shishmaref, capturing the lives of an Indigenous community facing climate change.

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ANECDOTE

Winning Trust Through Patient Courtship

Dana describes meeting Tony Bogart and slowly earning access to Imperial Courts by returning, testing a Polaroid, and building trust over time.
That initial courtship led to portraits made with a rented 4x5 and began a project she returned to decades later.

ADVICE

Protect Your Subjects In Editorial Work

Treat editorial commissions like personal work and keep creative autonomy where possible.
Insist on presentation that preserves subjects' dignity and makes at least one image usable beyond the original context.

ADVICE

Use Patience And Professional Focus

Be professionally focused and patient during shoots; waiting is part of getting the image you need.
Dana avoids distracting socializing and wins people over by being concentrated and reliable.

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In this episode of PhotoWork with Sasha Wolf, renowned photographer Dana Lixenberg discusses the power of portraiture and how editorial autonomy enabled her to safeguard the portrayal of individuals featured in her work within marginalized communities. Lixenberg shares the origins of Imperial Courts, her seminal project documenting life in the Los Angeles housing project of the same name, and the deep relationship of trust she built over more than two decades of work there. The conversation also explores her iconic portraits of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls, as well as her poignant book project, The Last Days of Shishmaref, which captures the lives of an Indigenous community on a disappearing Alaskan island.

https://grimmgallery.com/artists/42-dana-lixenberg/

https://www.instagram.com/danalixenberg

Dana Lixenberg is known for her stripped-down portraits that revel in the elemental characteristics of her subjects. She uses a large-format field camera – a cumbersome tool, which necessitates what the artist refers to as a ‘slow dance’ between her and her subjects. The resulting portraits contain an enormous amount of detail and texture, and are as revelatory as a personal encounter. The power of the work arises from its intimacy, compositional rigor and, importantly, the absence of social stereotyping. Lixenberg has been predominantly active in the United States, and her thorough understanding of the country and its society seeps through palpably in her work.

Besides her extensive editorial practice, for which she photographed many cultural icons, she pursues long-term projects with a primary focus on marginalized communities. These projects include Jeffersonville, Indiana (2005), a collection of landscapes and portraits of a small town’s homeless population and The Last Days of Shishmaref (2008), which portrays an Inupiaq community on an eroding island off the coast of Alaska. Lixenberg’s most extensive body of work to date is Imperial Courts, 1993-2015 (2015), which she begun in the aftermath of the 1992 Rodney King riots. Spanning 22 years, the project tracks the changing shape of an underserved community in Watts, Los Angeles. In contrast to the often one dimensional, sensationalized media coverage of this neighborhood, Lixenberg employs a more subdued and collaborative photographic approach. Like her other projects, Imperial Courts consists of a series of photographs and a publication. Exploring other media for the first time, Lixenberg also included audio recordings and created a three-channel video installation. The project was awarded the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize in 2017 and continues to be exhibited internationally.