Most of the world's population live in cities, but we are hardly aware of the impact of how the cities are structured and which space, physical and mental, the inhabitants can create to live in. In his photographic sketches, called Diaries, of cities around the world, German photographer Peter Bialobrzeski, shows the facade of the cities as metaphors for our society. In his book No Buddha in Suburbia, he captured the chaotic development of Mumbai, the largest city in India, where capitalism, feudalism and the caste system created an unequaled labyrinth of middle-class dwellers in high skyscrapers and pariah's huts with corrugated iron roofs.

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The title of the book No Buddha in Suburbia becomes apparent when you look at the pictures. You see chaos, the hustle and bustle of crowds of people, electricity cables hanging loose around poles and buildings, rubbish in the gutters, a cacophony of billboards, newly built skyscrapers that dominate the scene as spooky characters. Enlightenment and tranquillity of mind seem out of reach in the streets of the suburbia of Mumbai. "The book's title was an analogy after the novel The Buddha of Suburbia, written by Hanif Kureishi, about a guy who escaped suburban London. It was a play of words. But the title speaks more about the absence of a guiding thought in the urban planning of Mumbai. There are many layers in the book. The role of politics is one layer. My urge to show how the city looks like nowadays is another layer."

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Neoliberalism and corruption

In the book, the Indian architect and professor of city planning, Rahul Mehrotra, writes about the influence of globalisation, capitalism and neoliberal politics on the development of Mumbai. He notes that the state gave up its responsibility to design a city structure and left it to the market. Peter Bialobrzeski adds: "You cannot say that the neoliberal economy is the only factor playing a role in the development of Mumbai. There is a mixture of factors, like geography and the corruption and bad planning. So, all of these factors shaped what I photographed."

Often, we only see iconic photographs of the Gateway of India representing Mumbai, but they seldomly captured the outskirts in photographs. "It was an exploration because I thought that nobody ever photographed Mumbai suburbia that starts about 25 kilometres north of the gateway of India. Tourists hardly ever go there. In about two months, I really didn't meet any white people where I photographed."
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Framing beauty

The photographs of Mumbai have a subtle kind of beauty, where orderly straight lines of architectural corrected shots are combined with the cluttered and messy forms created by people, cars, fences, and corrugated steel plates, cloths, market stalls and tuk-tuks.

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In photography, you can't compose a picture. There can't be composition. It's always just framing.

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Peter Bialobrzeski says that his aesthetical influence came from the painters of the 19th century. "In photography, you can't compose a picture. There can't be composition. It's always just framing. If you have a white canvas, you can start to draw or to paint. But with photography, you're always framing something. I was always fascinated by 18th and 19th-century paintings. The painters use the camera obscura to frame the landscape. The large-format camera, which I used in the early 2000s, was modelled after that. I really became fascinated by combining 19th-century photography like the French Bisson brothers and just photographing simple street crossings, which nobody ever did. I went in 2011 to Dhaka in Bangladesh, and I was just trying to see what it looked like. So many people are photographing, and there are no photographs about what cities really look like."

Diaries

Mumbai is not the only city that Peter Bialobrzeski photographed. He is is creating an extensive series called Diaries, for which he made photographs in several of cities all over the world. He visited Belfast, Yangon, Zurich, Athens, Taipei, Linz, and even Minsk, the capital of Belarus.

"The concept of the Diaries is always rapid and random. I work basically a week or ten days, and then it's over. I start in the centre, gradually moving to the edges. My observations are subjective and fast. I don't claim to give an oversight of the city. It's kind of a quick impression."

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The idea is to create an archive of the contemporary city.

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A diary mostly is a very personal account of daily events, but the photographs of the Diaries all describe how a city looks like. Is that a contradiction? "Yeah, of course. I'm the transporter. So, I go there. I photograph, and I give you my point of view. And I'm not saying: this is Cairo, because who am I to say this is Cairo? I started in Cairo just after the Arab spring. The idea was to examine the city in relation to the pictures we had from the media. So, it made perfect sense to call it the diary and to make it small. And at the end of the day, the idea is to create an archive of the contemporary city at the beginning of the 21st century. Having said this, I didn’t do this by myself. I owe a lot to the graphic designer, Andrea Rauschenbusch, who developed the typeface and the layout, as well as closely working with me on the tile selection. Furthermore, the farsighted publisher, Eanna de Freine, whose company THEVELVETCELL took the courage in publishing such a niche venture. In 20 years' time, it will be fascinating to look at these books. So, there's a certain relevance."
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Buildings and people

In his Diaries, we see not only how the city is through the buildings, but there are often people in the photographs. How do they relate to each other, and why are people playing a role? "I photograph people because people live in cities. And I think it's much more interesting to show the context because also people wear clothes. They're a sign of the times. And also, I like this moment of colour synchronicity. Sometimes a person wears a jacket that goes with the colour of the building and things like that. I incorporate this to make it more interesting to make it more difficult for myself. Funny enough, I'm not really interested in architecture. I'm interested in the way the world is organised. It's more like the network."

We can sense that Bialobrzeski studied politics and sociology. The photographs show how decisions regarding how to build our society are made; they are metaphors for the things we don't see. "Like in Minsk, you see propaganda painting on the walls of the buildings."
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Modest wide-angle and subdued light

Peter Bialobrzeski started on film but changed to a digital DSRL camera with a modest wide-angle, 35 mm. "I don't like to use a super-wide angle. I prefer the look and feel of the 35mm, which is modest. It is also a tribute to the 19th c. photographers who used a similar lens. They didn't have wide-angle lenses. I don't like the typical photographic look. Neither do I like cheap photographic tricks. People should get excited by reflecting on a photograph and not by the immediate response because it looks 'cool'.

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In none of my photographs, something is happening that you could describe with words.

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The same approach counts for the photographers' use of light. There are no sunny pictures. "The use of the same quality of light has two purposes. One purpose is to create a certain kind of coherence, which you find in the diaries. They all follow the same aesthetic strategy. So, for me, it connects the pictures and also, on the other hand, because in none of my photographs, something is happening that you could describe with words.”

In developing his photographs, Bialobrzeski avoids deep shadows and digital saturation. "I think it's very much rooted in the time when I went to art school because at that time when colour photographs were published. They were photographed on colour slides, which tended to be underexposed and dramatic in magazines like National Geographic. And in order to have a distinction, I worked on colour negatives and exposed them rather lightly. It reflects the way I see the world. Blue skies and deep shadows create too much drama. This belongs to a paradigm that shouts: the world is beautiful. It gives me the shivers. It's like elevator music."
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Task of photography

According to Bialobrzeski, documentary photography has a task, and a means that other art forms can’t fulfil. "I think what photography really can do, what other art forms can't do, is tell us about the way we were, the way we are the moment. So in a way, for me, it's a perfect way to work on something I like, and I think it's a niche."

What photography can do is tell us about the way we were.

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Peter Bialobrzeski studied Politics and Sociology before he became a photographer for a local paper in his native Wolfsburg/Germany. He travelled extensivly in Asia before he went back to study photography at the Folkwangschule in Essen and the LCP in London. In the last seventeen years he has published twenty–one books. His work has been exhibited in Europe, USA, Asia, Afrika and Australia. He won several awards including the prestigious World Press Photo Award 2003 and 2010. Since 2002 Peter is a regular Professor for photography at the University of the Arts in Bremen/Germany. Furthermore he runs workshops around the world. He is represented by Peter Sillem Gallery in Frankfurt/Germany, Laurence Miller Gallery in New York, and also shows with Robert Morat Gallery in Berlin, as well as at m97Gallery in Shanghai. In 2012 he was honoured with the Dr. Erich Salomon – Award by the German Society of Photographers (DGPh).

www.bialobrzeski.net

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