Tbilisi Diary belongs to Peter Bialobrzeski’s City Diaries, a long-term documentary project begun in 2013 and conceived on the scale of some fifty volumes. Each title tests a single proposition: whether the image of a city we carry in advance—assembled from prejudice, preconception and media representation—can be translated into photographs that answer back. For this instalment Bialobrzeski worked in Tbilisi between 26 April and 4 May 2024, days marked by demonstrations against a proposed law and by the police response to them. A diary note reproduced in the book records a city that by noon seems to have resumed its ordinary rhythm before crowds return in the evening, followed by violence.

His method is deliberate and cumulative. He photographs with a consistent, apparently objectifying visual language, attentive to the cultural differences legible in a streetscape and to what increasing globalization has already smoothed away. Because the terms stay fixed from city to city, meaning accumulates across the series; Tbilisi can be read against the volumes on New York or Norderney. The book is therefore less a portrait of a singular place than a controlled experiment in what documentary photographs can and cannot recover of a city’s character.

Hartmann Books issues the title as a softcover with flaps: 96 pages and 45 illustrations at 14 by 21 centimetres, with text by Bialobrzeski in English and design by Sarah Fricke of Distaff Studio. The proportions suit the project’s diary logic—a compact object, closer to a working notebook than to an exhibition catalogue.

For readers, the case rests on continuity as much as on the individual volume. City Diaries is a serial work whose argument emerges through comparison; Tbilisi Diary takes its place within an ongoing sequence rather than standing alone. Bialobrzeski is both the photographer of the images and the author of the text throughout.