Peter Bialobrzeski: City Diaries as an Archive of the Contemporary Urban Environment at the Beginning of the 21st Century

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Peter Bialobrzeski is known for his series of urban spaces, like "Neon Tigers" (2004), "Lost in Transition" (2007), "Paradise Now" (2009), "Case Study Homes" (2009), "The Raw and the Cooked" (2011), but also for his photographs of German landscapes in "Heimat" (2005). In "Die Zweite Heimat" (2017), he has connected photographs of life in the German countryside with urban motifs.

Over the last years, Bialobrzeski has worked on a long-term project, the "City Diaries". Eight volumes have been published so far: Cairo Diary, Athens Diary, Taipei Dairy, Wolfsburg Diary, Kochi Diary, Beirut Diary, Zurich Diary, and Wuhan Diary. Osaka, Mumbai, Yangon, Bangkok, Hagen, Belfast, Budapest, Minsk, and Georgetown (Malaysia), Dhaka, Sarajevo, and Linz are in preparation. In his diaries, Peter Bialobrzeski explores and examines how the image of a city – feeding on prejudices and found material – can be transformed into a specific photographic image. Can we see Cairo without the Arabian spring, Athens without the Euro crisis, Wuhan without the corona virus, and Bialobrzeski's hometown Wolfsburg without VW and the exhaust scandal? "As an artist, my interest is not with the sights, the landscape, the events that are usually related to that very place. While I go along the project emerges in its form fueled by knowledge and intuition. I'm interested in the overlooked things you may find anywhere, which are not so easy to read, but when you look at them in the right way, they are loaded with meaning. The photographs can be read in a sociological, artistic, documentary and historical context. But they also address the space between the author and the city out there."

Peter Bialobrzeski, born 1961 in Wolfsburg, is professor of photography at the Hochschule für Künste, Bremen. He lives in Hamburg.

Peter Bialobrzeski has been awarded an artistic residency at the Fondazione Studio Marangoni in Florence. This event is based on a cooperation between the Photothek and Fondazione Studio Marangoni.