Amsterdam’s Red-Light District — known locally as De Wallen — has long been one of the most densely human neighborhoods in Europe. In the 1990s, before city-led cleanup campaigns and mass tourism reshaped its character, the area operated as a raw, working ecosystem. Sex workers stood behind lit windows. Dealers worked corners. Tourists wandered past addicts and cleaners, all sharing the same narrow canal-side streets.
Photographer Huub Prickaerts didn’t visit De Wallen — he lived there. Through the 1990s, he embedded himself in the neighborhood and documented the full range of people who occupied it daily: sex workers, their clients, local criminals, tourists passing through, sanitation workers, and those deep in addiction. His access was intimate in a way that no outside photographer could replicate.
Photographing in the Red-Light District came with real obstacles. Sex workers, club owners, and the people who ran the area’s underground economy had no interest in being documented. Cameras were unwelcome, and pointing one at the wrong person carried genuine risk. Prickaerts developed a practical workaround: he shot from the hip, aiming his camera without raising it to his eye, often looking in a different direction entirely while he pressed the shutter.
The technique stripped away any sense of posed performance. Nobody in his frames is performing for the camera, because nobody knew the camera was there. The result is a set of images that feel unguarded — street life caught at its most unfiltered.
De Wallen in the 1990s was not a single-note place. Alongside the window brothels and sex shops, ordinary neighborhood life continued. Residents did their shopping. Workers cleaned the streets before dawn. The area held a functioning community, even as its economy was driven largely by the sex trade and drug markets that operated openly on its streets.
That texture — the coexistence of the illicit and the mundane — is what Prickaerts captured. His photographs don’t editorialize. A sex worker leaning in a doorway, a john walking away, a cleaner hosing down a sidewalk at 5 a.m. — each image carries equal weight. There is no hierarchy of subjects.
Since the 1990s, Amsterdam’s city government has worked steadily to reduce the scale of prostitution in De Wallen. Dozens of window brothels have been shut down under anti-trafficking and urban renewal programs. The shift has been dramatic: the neighborhood that Prickaerts photographed no longer exists in the same form.
Tourism has also transformed the district’s atmosphere. Through the 2000s and into the 2010s, De Wallen became a major attraction for visitors, many of whom came specifically to gawk. The volume of foot traffic changed the dynamic between workers and the street, and local residents pushed back hard against what they described as an open-air spectacle built around their neighborhood.
Prickaerts’ photographs stand as a document of a specific place at a specific time. The De Wallen he recorded — unglamorous, functional, and largely indifferent to outside observation — is the one these images preserve. His hip-shot method, born out of necessity, produced a body of work that a conventional approach almost certainly could not have.
