In Peter Bialobrzeski’s City Diaries, a long-term project the photographer began in 2013 and plans to run to fifty volumes, Istanbul Diary records one week in the city: 12 to 18 February 2023. The dates are not incidental. In his opening note he describes arriving two days late because of a cancelled flight; the airline blamed bad weather, while he suspects the aircraft had been diverted in connection with the earthquake that devastated parts of southeastern Turkey and northern Syria. He asks whether it is appropriate to travel to a country where so many people have lost loved ones. The question hangs over what follows without settling into a statement.
Across the series Bialobrzeski returns to a consistent set of questions: whether the image a city carries through prejudice, prior notions and media representations can be translated into real photographs, what increasing globalisation has already superimposed on a cityscape, and what remains visible. His approach is patient and deliberately undramatic, a visual language that appears objectifying and whose real subject is the difficulty of seeing a place as it is. The book is published by Hartmann Books: 96 pages with 45 illustrations, English text by the photographer himself, design by Sarah Fricke of Distaff Studio, and a softcover with flaps. The modest 14 by 21 centimetre format suits a diary rather than a survey, and the sequencing carries the meaning as the reader moves through an ordinary week in a city under pressure.
Readers who follow the City Diaries have watched the project accumulate into something larger than its individual volumes, since Bialobrzeski’s premise can be read in any one book but is fully legible only in comparison across the series. This is a series entry rather than a retrospective, and its interest lies in the collision between a fixed visual method and a particular week: what that method produces when the context is grief, aftershock and a febrile city in February. The publisher notes that a limited edition is available alongside the regular printing; further detail on that edition is not documented here. Taken on its own terms, Istanbul Diary is a concentrated record of a week whose circumstances could not be repeated, examined through a discipline built for repetition.
