iDubai

by Joel Sternfeld (Photographer), Jonathan Crary (Contributor)

As Paris and its shopping arcades were to the 19th Century, Dubai and its wondrous malls may be to the new millennium. The Baudelarian fl neur, is replaced by the phoneur, a wired wanderer who uses the cell phone to text and call and access the internet, all the while snapping digital images on the fly. If the arcades were representative sites of early capitalism, then perhaps the postmodern shopping playgrounds of Dubai are exemplars of advanced capitalism. With this in mind, when Joel Sternfeld visited these malls in 2008, he documented them with the consumer fetish object of the moment - the iPhone. In the process, he achieves a very particular unity of form and content; the object that encapsulates the spirit of an era is used to document that era.
The ramifications of a profusion of mobile phone cameras around the globe are numerous. We have already witnessed this phenomenon becoming a platform for news construction with civilian journalism changing the documentation of events. In Dubai, Joel Sternfeld uses his iPhone camera to get past mass media images of the Emirate as Disney World on the Persian Gulf, and find a human component.

Genres: Photography

160 pages, Hardcover

First published December 31, 2009

About the author

Joel Sternfeld is an artist-photographer whose work is concerned with utopic and dystopic possibilities of the American experience.

Ever since the publication of his landmark study American Prospects in 1987, his work has maintained conceptual and political aspects, while also being steeped in history, art history, landscape theory and attention to seasonal passage. It is a melancholic, spectacular, funny and profound portrait of America. The curator Kevin Moore has claimed that the work embodies the “synthetic culmination of so many photographic styles of the 1970s, incorporating the humor and social perspicacity of street photography with the detached restraint of New Topographics photographs and the pronounced formalism of works by so many late-decade colorists” (Kevin Moore, Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970-1980).

On This Site (1996) examines violence in America while simultaneously raising significant epistemological questions about photographs as objects of knowledge.

Sweet Earth: Experimental Utopias in America (2006) “can be seen as a generous respite from the traumatic history in On This Site... It is a survey of American human socialization, alternative ways of living, of hopeful being” (Elin O’Hara Slavik, 2018).

All his subsequent work has sought to expand the narrative possibilities of still photography primarily through an authored text. All of his books and bodies of work converse with each other and may be read as a collective whole.

His work represents a melding of time and place that serves to elucidate, honor, and warn. The images hold a certain urgency, as their histories survive solely through their photographic representation— they are an archive for the future.

Sternfeld is the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships and spent a year in Italy on a Rome Prize. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College, where he holds the Noble Foundation Chair in Art and Cultural History.

Reviews

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

If a book that makes you want to puke can be good, this is it. Joel Sternfeld is truly a master of boredom, in the sense that he can take subjects as diverse as shrubs growing in the Oxbow of the Connecticut in one corner of a Thomas Cole painting (Oxbow Anthology), faces of bureaucrats at a global warming conference (When It Changed), and the criminally dull "global" culture of Dubai and make something compelling and tense out of whatever seemingly blasé subject he turns his lens to.

In iDubai, that lens is an iPhone, to which Sternfeld brings his magisterial command of large-format photography. Many of these photos were shot in the icy, expressionless, zombified style that large format lends itself to. In fact, it's the perfect touch for the zombie shopping mall atmosphere where most of these photos were taken, a Plutonian realm of Middle Eastern Burger Kings, "Utopia" jewelry shops, and the absolute effacement of culture by polo-shirt plastic global re-engineering where humans turn as expressionless as the rocks and gullies and dead industrial zones that traditional 8x10 photography often warned us of. Earth, Dubai, Nowheresville. The maximization of a future ghost town. Bodie, California, take two, briefly repopulated and digitally remastered as capitalist oasis on the margins of the Arabian desert. The Desert Cantos of Richard Misrach or Lewis Baltz's Park City, Utah, refracted across time into the lusterless gadget-saturated eyes of a globalized teenager. The dead syntax of a climate-controlled collective future.

I can see why landscape photographers like Sternfeld, weaned on traditional landscape fare, would turn to Dubai retail outlets to give us another scary tale. After all, something in this book is a truly frightening and claustrophobic glimpse into a polyester facelift hell. Oddly, in this "non-landscape", Sternfeld does what landscape photographers have long done really well -- give us a vision that says "don't do this." I think the roots of iDubai go back at some deep level to what was foreshadowed by the likes of Timothy O'Sullivan or Matthew Brady, looking at desert rocks in Nevada and war carnage in Virginia and saying to the world: "don't come here. This is what your big ideas lead to. And this is actually a picture of hell."

Typed on my iPhone.

[M.i. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Impressive use of cell phone photography to capture the pulse of a place.