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Loading... iDubaiby Jonathan Crary
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. What Parisian shopping arcades were to the nineteenth century and capitalism, Dubai's luxurious mega-malls are to the new millennium and late capitalism. The Baudelairean flâneur, who patrolled the avenues as a detached observer, today is replaced by the phoneur, a wired wanderer who uses a cell phone to text, call, Web-surf and snap digital images on the fly. The ubiquitous cellphone camera has already become a valid tool of civilian journalism. Celebrated photographer Joel Sternfeld visited Dubai in 2008, documenting its new malls with the consumer fetish object du jour, the iPhone. In this volume, the photographer's twelfth photobook, Sternfeld counters the popular myth that the United Arab Emirates is the Persian Gulf's Disney World, locating subtler social strata and interactions. Included is an essay by Columbia University art historian, Jonathan Crary, who considers the implications of Sternfeld's mobile gaze. no reviews | add a review
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. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)779.4092The arts Photography, computer art, cinematography, videography Photographic images Architectural subjects and cityscapesLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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