Peter Bialobrzeski’s Wilson Diary records a stay of roughly two and a half weeks in March 2023, and it belongs to a working method he has pursued since 2013: the City Diaries, in which he tests whether the idea of a place we carry in advance—a product of prejudices, personal observations, and media communications—can be converted into a specific image. Bialobrzeski photographs in a deliberately leveling register, and the diary text runs alongside the pictures, so that impressions, addresses, and chance encounters accumulate rather than resolve into a single thesis. The volume’s opening entry, about a warehouse room beside a brewery whose beers carry sentence-length names, sets the tone: observant, droll, alert to the ways civic character survives inside commercial routine.
The series is built on a constraint, and the constraint is the point. Format and extent are held constant across the titles, which allows one city to be read against another, a megalopolis against a Westphalian town of middling size. Wilson Diary extends that comparative frame, and its diaristic spine keeps the sequence tied to particular days rather than to generalities about urban life. Political and social pressures surface in the work without being announced: the publisher notes that Cairo cannot be understood apart from the Arab Spring, Athens apart from the euro crisis. Nothing in the photographs is staged as evidence, but nothing is neutral either.
The book is modest in appearance and exacting in construction. Ninety-six pages carry forty-five illustrations and Bialobrzeski’s own text, in a softcover with flaps at 14 by 21 centimeters, designed by Sarah Fricke of Distaff Studio and published by Hartmann Books in 2024. Collectors who follow the City Diaries will recognize the consistency of the series as its argument; readers coming to Bialobrzeski for the first time will find a compact, self-contained installment that can be read in an evening and returned to for its details. Melanie Mühl, writing in the FAZ on the publication of Athens Diary, put the case plainly: everyone should see these photographs.
