Hong Kong in 2020: It is a medical, economic, and, above all, political state of emergency – all at the same time. The complexity of this crisis is difficult to put into words. But it can be expressed in pictures. Elisabeth Neudörfl set off for the lively metropolis to capture the situation on the ground in photographs. She encountered a city deeply marked by protests and its struggle for democracy, the intransigence of power, and the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Neudörfl's images were taken, on the demonstration routes and at the universities. Signs of dystopia are everywhere: closed stores, streets without traffic, deserted metro stations. The graffiti alone reflect the conflicts and the changes in the city. With these images, viewers are in a position to form their picture of the catastrophe.

ELISABETH NEUDÖRFL (*1968) studied photography in Dortmund and Leipzig. She deals in her photographic oeuvre with the urban space as an expression of social, political, and historical discourses. She is a professor of documentary photography at the Folkwang Universität der Künste in Essen.