iDubai
27 Jan
Interesting… I found this in my Amazon recommendations, one of the only times I’ve seen anything I’m actually interested in and hadn’t heard of already.
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 flaneur, 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.
160 pages, 70 plates. A February release according to Steidl, but Amazon says March 31.
First big-name iPhone book? (Besides Chase Jarvis?)
If the picture on the cover is representative, this isn’t anything to be excited about. I just got American Prospects, and this is pretty much the opposite of that book (and the rest of Sternfeld’s ouvre). And since I think he did so many things right in the past, it follows that inverting all that is doing many things wrong. Meh.
I was just surprised that he moved to iPhone. I’d be curious to see it though honestly, I wouldn’t buy it.