In 2019, Hartmann Books published No Buddha in Suburbia, Peter Bialobrzeski’s photographic case study of Mumbai’s periphery. The book gathers roughly seventy images made after an invitation from the Goethe-Institut, returning the photographer to Asia after his project on his native Germany. Mumbai’s suburban sprawl ranks among the largest on earth, and Bialobrzeski works against the Western associations of the word suburbia: here density reaches some 22,000 people per square kilometer, and the streets hold derelict structures, new high-rises, slums, billboards, and elevated highways in uneasy proximity.
His response is the tableau—large, condensed views that hold contradictory urban facts in a single frame, making complexity legible without resolving it. The photographs appear in this volume for the first time. Rahul Mehrotra, principal of RMA Architects and a professor of urban design and planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, contributes an essay, giving the sequence an architectural and planning perspective rather than a strictly photographic one. Text is in English and German.
The book’s design is credited to Andrea Rauschenbusch, and the publisher’s edition details describe a hardcover with a foil-stamped title and a tipped-in image on the back cover; at 24.3 by 30.4 centimeters and 168 pages, the format gives the dense tableaux room to be read. For a collector, the interest lies in that combination: a sustained body of new work by a photographer whose urban studies are widely exhibited, an essay by a leading voice on Indian urbanism, and a considered object in which sequence, scale, and design carry the argument. It rewards attention not as documentation alone but as an interpretation of how a city’s edge actually behaves.
