Peter Bialobrzeski’s Sarajevo Diary is organized around a date range rather than a narrative arc: April 10 to April 18, 2019, eight days in a city whose recent history is written into its surfaces. The book belongs to the City Diaries, a project the photographer has pursued since 2013, asking whether the image of a place formed beforehand — by prejudice, by personal observation, by the media — can be converted into a specific, accountable photograph. Sarajevo joins cities such as Osaka, Wuhan, Cairo, Athens and Wolfsburg in that sequence, and the volumes share a fixed format and page count so that different urban settings can be set beside one another.
What distinguishes this entry is the particular weight of the city. Bialobrzeski’s own diary text, printed alongside the pictures, records the ordinary work of looking: a cable car climbing a steep hill, buildings that recall favelas, a housing complex built for the athletes of the 1984 Winter Olympics, and a parking lot he recognizes from a photograph seen days earlier in the city’s Historical Museum — full of wrecked cars, their late-1980s colors intact. The passage turns on that small coincidence of seeing and re-seeing, which is also the method of the book.
The photographs are made in a deliberately objectifying manner, and the withholding is the point. Bialobrzeski is after the cultural differences that globalization tends to blur, and he lets political and social pressures register without illustrating them. The book runs 96 pages with 45 illustrations, designed by Sarah Fricke of Distaff Studio and issued by Hartmann Books as a softcover with flaps, 14 by 21 centimeters. It received the Bronze Medal at the German Photobook Award 2023.
Sarajevo Diary is one installment in an ongoing, systematically consistent project by a photographer whose work has been widely exhibited and whose honors include two World Press Photo Awards and, in 2012, the Dr. Erich Salomon Award from the German Photographic Society. The uniform design makes the individual volume legible both on its own terms and as part of a comparative record of early-twenty-first-century urban life.
