Lob der Polizei

Hamburg in the summer of 2017, the top diplomats of the G20 countries are meeting in the port metropolis for a weekend in July. With his camera, photographer Markus Dorfmüller documents the work of the police and the social state of emergency during these days. The publication combines the resulting photographs with a selection of approximately 20,000 archived Twitter messages that refer to the official hashtag of the police #G20HAM17 and, in interaction with the photographic images, describe the relationship of the city’s inhabitants to the police. In his accompanying essay, Marinus Reuter discusses the close pact that the metropolis made with its police power already at the time of industrialization in order to be able to expand undisturbed. A picture develops of an urban landscape in which the whimsical rumors of social media become the precinct of modern police public relations, while a renaissance of the old uniformed police force takes hold on the streets.