Robert Knoth

Neither men nor women. The red light district in the Pakistani city of Lahore is
as famous in South Asia as the Amsterdam district by the same name is throughout the West. Strict rules about the separation of men and women in Muslim societies have determined men and boys to have more explicit roles in many branches of the entertainment industry including dance, theatre and the sex industry. Important in Lahore are Hijras, best defined as ‘neither men nor women’. Men born as transgender, hermaphrodite or of female gender, trapped inside male bodies.

Using powerful attention to detail, Knoth’s portraiture and documentary work has received international acclaim including two World Press Photo awards, the Prague Photo Prize, the American PDN awards and multiple Dutch Silver Camera awards.

His work has been published by (amongst others) New York Times, Mother Jones, The Sunday Telegraph Magazine, Guardian, La Repubblica, South China Morning Post, Foto8, Le Monde and Die Zeit.

After a career in pop photography, Knoth has been concentrating on photo documentary. His sober black and white portraits shot on large format camera have been compared with Diane Arbus, Eugene Smith and August Sander’s images of the early twentieth century.

Together with his wife Antoinette de Jong he is currently working on a longer term project which documents the impact of Afghan heroin in countries along the most trafficked routes from Afghanistan to Europe. The project is supported by the Sem Presser Fund for Documentary Photography and the Dutch Foundation for Democracy and Media.