We Hate HH and So Do I

Hamburg has a mythology it doesn’t quite deserve. The harbor romance, the Reeperbahn as edgy-but-livable, the Schanzenviertel with its brunch spots and political murals—all real, technically, but it shares the city with a texture the tourism board photographs around rather than through. That texture is, to put it plainly, grim. The central station smells like a urinal that’s been slowly fermenting since 1987. Large stretches of the city look like they were designed by someone who had heard of cities but never actually visited one.

The Instagram account We Hate HH has made a project of this reality. Under the hashtag #WeHateHH, residents submit photos of the genuinely, specifically ugly—not stylishly rough, not charming-in-decay, just bleak. The result is a counter-archive to every filtered shot of colorful townhouses reflected in the Alster.

It’s not a fair portrait. Hamburg has places worth seeing, which I suspect the account’s contributors know perfectly well. But fair portraits are everywhere. Sometimes you want the angle everyone else is cropping out.