Peter Bialobrzeski’s *New York Diary* records a short stay in Manhattan, from March 29 to April 8, 2023, and the diary form is meant literally: the book reproduces the photographer’s own written account of those days alongside the pictures he made. The dates place the work in a specific historical frame. During the visit, Donald Trump surrendered at the District Attorney’s office in Lower Manhattan before his arraignment, and Bialobrzeski’s text notes the motorcade and the live coverage, so the city under observation is both an ordinary working environment and a stage for an extraordinary public event.

The volume belongs to the City Diaries, a long-term project begun in 2013 and planned for fifty volumes, of which this is the thirty-third. Across that series Bialobrzeski asks whether inherited ideas about a city, built from prejudice, prior images and media coverage, can be translated into actual photographs, and what cultural differences remain legible in a cityscape as globalization overlays more of it. His manner is consistent and seemingly objectifying, an approach that becomes most apparent when one volume is set beside another.

*New York Diary* is published by Hartmann Books in a softcover edition with flaps, 96 pages and 45 illustrations, with text by the photographer and a design by Sarah Fricke of Distaff Studio. The compact 14 × 21 cm format suits a book meant to be handled and compared rather than displayed as an object.

For a reader, the book’s interest lies in that comparability. The series is designed so that individual titles read against each other, and a New York entry carries particular weight within it, since the city is so heavily mediated before any photographer arrives. The dated text gives this volume a documentary edge beyond the usual city album, fixing a place and a fortnight in relation to each other.