Palermo Diary belongs to Peter Bialobrzeski’s City Diaries, a long-term documentary project begun in 2013 and planned, according to the publisher, for roughly fifty volumes. In it, a single city becomes the occasion for testing whether the mental image we carry of a place—assembled from prejudice, preconception, and media representation—can be answered by photographs. The Palermo installment is presented by the publisher as covering December 9–17, 2024, a stay of a little more than a week, yet it is not travel reportage in the usual sense. Bialobrzeski works with a consistent, deliberately restrained visual language, holding to a vantage that appears objective in order to let the cultural particularities of a cityscape surface on their own terms: what globalization has smoothed away and what stubbornly remains.

Hartmann Books issues the volume at 14 × 21 cm, ninety-six pages, with forty-five illustrations and text by the photographer—the notes that accompany this City Diary. Sarah Fricke, of Distaff Studio, is responsible for the design, and the softcover with flaps keeps the book modest in the hand, close to the scale of a notebook. The small format is not incidental. It supports the project’s premise that these are records rather than monuments, and it makes the book legible as one installment among many.

That serial structure is central to the work’s character. Bialobrzeski asks what a city looks like once inherited images are set aside, and the answer is only properly visible when single volumes are placed beside one another—Palermo next to New York or Norderney. Each book is complete in itself, but each also functions as a term in a larger comparison. The City Diaries are best understood as an ongoing project whose individual volumes gain from being read in sequence and against one another, with Palermo as a specific, localized entry within a deliberately expansive program.