Photography Book Dana Lixenberg, Imperial Courts 1993-2015

Dutch photographer Dana Lixenberg has documented a Los Angeles Afro-American community from 1993 to the present day. In 1993, she travelled to South Central Los Angeles for a Dutch magazine story on the riots that erupted following the verdict in the Rodney King trial. Over the following 22 years, she has returned countless times to the Imperial Courts housing project in Watts with her 4×5 camera, gradually creating a collaborative portrait of the changing face of this community. Over the years, people have been killed, or disappeared while others, once children in early photographs, grew up and had children of their own. Imperial Courts constitutes a complex and moving document of the passage of time in a forgotten community while exploring the degrees of change that can be recorded by the camera. Using a large format camera, Lixenberg pursues long-term personal projects with a primary focus on individuals and communities on the margins of society. This includes her series Jeffersonville, Indiana, a collection of landscapes and portraits of the small town’s homeless population, and The Last Days of Shishmaref, which documents an Inupiat community on an eroding island off the coast of Alaska.

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