on the street

Hong Kong in 2020: a state of emergency that is at once medical, economic, and above all, political. The complexity of this crisis is hard to put into words, but it can be rendered in images. Elisabeth Neudörfl travelled to the vibrant metropolis to document the situation with her camera. What she saw was a city shaped by protests and its struggle for democracy, by the tenacity of power, and by the outbreak of Covid-19. Neudörfl's images were taken on protest routes and university campuses. Dystopian signs are everywhere: closed shops, streets without traffic, deserted subway stations. The only graffiti reflects the city's conflicts and changes. Through these images, viewers are left to construct their own understanding of this catastrophe.

ELISABETH NEUDÖRFL (born 1968) studied photography in Dortmund and Leipzig. Her photographic work focuses on urban spaces, viewing them as expressions of social, political, and historical discourse. She is a professor of documentary photography at the Folkwang Universität der Künste in Essen.