Peter Bialobrzeski’s Unna Diary belongs to City Diaries, an ongoing project begun in 2013 in which he tests whether a city, as we think we know it through prejudice, personal observation, and media, can be converted into a specific image. Unna, a medium-sized Westphalian town, is a deliberately modest subject within a series that also encompasses major cities. That contrast is the point: the series’ consistent format and page count invite comparison between places of radically different scale, and Unna’s ordinariness becomes a measure against which other urban settings can be read.

The book records six days in April 2021. Its photographs are accompanied by Bialobrzeski’s diary entries, which describe, among other things, a morning walk shadowed by a motorized street sweeper and a leaf blower, and a worker explaining that his job is to stir up the filth so the machine can carry it away. Such passages are not decoration. They establish the photographer’s working method as diaristic and sequential, a daily discipline of looking rather than a portfolio of independent pictures. The design by Sarah Fricke of Distaff Studio holds the 45 illustrations and the text together within 96 pages, in a softcover with flaps measuring 14 by 21 centimeters.

Bialobrzeski’s broader practice has long examined how globalization conceals cultural difference; his City Diaries also register political and social developments in the places he visits. Unna Diary does this at a deliberately modest scale, and that modesty is the achievement. The volume is part of a systematic series in which format and page count are identical across titles, allowing a comparative view of different urban settings. Readers interested in the photobook as a sustained serial project, in the diary form, or in Bialobrzeski’s long-term investigation will find this a coherent and necessary volume within it.