Peter Bialobrzeski’s Kigali Diary belongs to City Diaries, a documentary project he has pursued since 2013 and envisions at roughly fifty volumes. Each book takes a single city as its field of inquiry, asking whether the mental image we carry of a place—assembled from prejudice, prior photographs and media coverage—can be converted into actual visual records. This volume turns that question toward Kigali, the Rwandan capital the photographer visited for the first time in February 2025; the diary is dated February 8 to 18 of that year. It is published by Hartmann Books in a softcover with flaps, 96 pages and 45 illustrations, at 14 by 21 centimeters, designed by Sarah Fricke of Distaff Studio. Bialobrzeski is both photographer and author of the accompanying text.
What distinguishes the series is method rather than spectacle. Bialobrzeski works in a consistent, apparently objectifying visual language, and the pictures resist the dramatic emphasis toward which photojournalism so often gravitates. His interest lies in cultural difference as it surfaces in ordinary cityscape—in streets, façades, vegetation and light—and in what globalization has already smoothed over. The Rwandan entry carries an additional charge: the photographer arrives without prior experience of the region and records that unfamiliarity in his own words, registering comparisons and first impressions as they come.
For collectors, the argument for Kigali Diary rests on sequence and comparison. City Diaries is an ongoing, long-range undertaking, and individual volumes gain meaning when set beside the others. A reader who knows the earlier books can follow what persists in the photographer’s approach and what each location alters; a reader who does not can still read this one on its own terms. The small format, generous margins and restrained design make it a working book, meant to be handled and re-read rather than displayed.
Bialobrzeski’s photographs have been exhibited internationally, and he has received two World Press Photo Awards, in 2003 and 2010, as well as the Dr. Erich Salomon Award from the German Photographic Society in 2012. Those facts establish a career of sustained attention. Yet the case for this book is finally internal to the series: it extends a long documentary inquiry to a city the photographer had never seen, and it does so with the discipline that has kept the project coherent for more than a decade.
