Peter Bialobrzeski’s Vilnius Diary records two stays in the Lithuanian capital: July 11–13, 2021, and March 25–30, 2022. The first visit was cut short by the pandemic, and a later trip became impossible; when the photographer finally returned, Russia had invaded Ukraine. The book’s short text, written by Bialobrzeski himself, sets that return against the memory of civil-defense drills in 1970s schools, so the Lithuanian streets are read in the shadow of a war unfolding just beyond them.

The volume belongs to the City Diaries, a long-term documentary project begun in 2013 and planned for fifty volumes, in which Bialobrzeski tests whether a city’s image—formed by prejudice, prior notions and media representation—can be translated into actual photographs. Vilnius joins recent volumes on New York, Norderney and Istanbul. What interests him is not the iconic monument but the ordinary cityscape, and the question of how much local difference survives globalization and how much has been overlaid by it. The visual language is consistent and seemingly objectifying: frontal, level, patiently sequenced views that let one city be compared with another.

Designed by Sarah Fricke of Distaff Studio, the book is a softcover with flaps, 14 by 21 centimeters, 96 pages and 45 illustrations, with the photographer’s text in English. Its small, portable format suits a diary, and the two-part structure gives the sequence a temporal hinge: a truncated first visit, then a return into altered political weather.

For collectors, the interest lies in the project rather than in any claim of scarcity: Vilnius Diary extends a coherent, ongoing body of work, and its meaning sharpens when it is shelved beside the other City Diaries. It is a document of a particular city at a particular moment, made by an author who is also its photographer.