As Paris and its shopping arcades were to the 19th Century Dubai and its wondrous malls may be
to the new millennium. The Baudelarian flâneur 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.
