The public sector seen through the lens ‘The public sector’ is an abstract concept. What does the public sector really look like? In each year’s Annual Report, we leave it entirely up to a photographer to give us his or her take on that. Nils Lund Pedersen (born in 1968) has been a freelance photojournalist for the past 20 years. He trained in the city of Aarhus and has lived and worked in Copenhagen and Odense, and, as a completely new thing, he is now based in the town of Maribo on the island of Lolland. He has made and contributed to several books, among others ‘Fyn — Mennesker og steder’ (Funen — People and Places) and ‘Punkt 636’ (Point 636), a picture book on the reform of municipal structures. Further, he was one of the jury members at the ‘Danish Press Photo of the Year 2011/2012’. In Nils Lund Pedersen’s words: ‘The public sector is everywhere. It permeates our lives. Not as something scary but as an omnipresent safety net, built up through many years of welfare state. It exists in the biggest of cities and the smallest of villages. And protects us. With my new local community of Maribo on the island of Lolland as my starting point, I have found areas in the public sector where a hand is helping, securing, protecting and monitoring our shared community and the individual person. I have made a virtue of steering away from the offices to find more exciting visual expressions. But also to show the diversity of the public hands working for the greater good of society.’