iDubai

Most photographers returning from Dubai in the last few years would likely bring with them images of at least some of the celebrated (or notorious) features which make this place a nearly unique global site. These would include the colossal architectural and earth-moving projects that have produced the tallest skyscrapers in the world, the largest shopping malls, spectacular fantasy theme parks, underwater hotels, and man-made archipelagoes of island cities. But Joel Sternfeld's photographs exclude almost completely a sense of the immense proportions of this twenty-first-century dream world still in progress at this moment. Instead, his cell phone camera is turned in a different direction on events occurring on a smaller and more immediate scale. In many ways, the Dubai conjured in his photographs is a place we all know, even if we have never literally been there. Within the excess and singularity of this new global playground are many of the familiar and mundane features which processes of globalization have imposed all over the planet. Of course, the homogeneous Starbucks/shopping mall world is the milieu that Sternfeld's camera traverses, but what is important and affecting about his images is their disclosure of how human beings inhabit and experience such spaces, and how this is represented by a tiny digital camera wielded by an ambulatory observer. Clearly, the words inhabit and experience are problematic here because the artificial universe of Dubai is inimical both to the very idea of habitation and is an environment which undermines or even eradicates the historically accumulated meanings of what has been thought of as experience. What Sternfeld shows us, then, with all the nuance of his art, are people negotiating and subsisting in these profoundly alienating surroundings.

The indoor mall world of Dubai is a quintessential non-place in which people circulate, shop, eat, and spend time in various ways. A non-place is where it is assured nothing can really happen. It is where nothing will ever occur that could become part of a collective or individual memory and thus become a form of experience that could be preserved, communicated, and shared. In the late twentieth century, any huge international airport was a defining example of such a site, where the phenomenon of large numbers of people in transit neutralized any of the vitality or unpredictability of older models of a public space. Dubai can stand for a new delirious phase in the processes through which variegated human environments are appropriated and reshaped according to the imperatives of financial calculation. Space is drained of its long-standing qualitative features and its meanings and uses are determined by the wealth which can be extracted from it. The dynamism of urban culture over the last 150 years has been due to the persistence of alternative ways of constructing social spaces and networks. But in Dubai we see an extreme form of what the political thinker Guy Debord called the suppression of the street and all its potential unruliness and spontaneity. Sternfeld reveals a city from which history has been excluded except as spectacle (a mural of Renaissance Venice, a replica of a Chinese sailing ship). This dislocation of space from historical time implies a place where nothing unforeseen or unplanned can happen. Of course, this is a fantasy, as the numerous incidents of strikes and protests in Dubai by imported laborers and workers attest. Perhaps also the impact of global recession has left visible traces in its sleek surfaces, more for sale signs on its lavish condominiums, but its essential topography and operation no doubt remain unchanged.

To reiterate, what interests Sternfeld most is the actuality of people within this simulation of public space. We see image after image of individuals who manifest in various ways that particularly modern condition of displacement, in which one's physical presence in a specific location is blurred and dispersed. What once would have been a contradictory state of being scattered among two or more places simultaneously becomes normalized. Not only is it a question of proliferating communication technologies, but it is equally a result of a built environment which, despite its myriad attractions and seductions, is incapable of engaging its inhabitants in any authentic or holistic connections. Sternfeld reveals this fundamental incongruity, where people are like drops of water gliding aimlessly on an utterly impermeable material. He pinpoints in his pictures a loose association of psychological states that are beyond boredom or indifference, beyond anticipation of something novel or unexpected.

Rarely has the pursuit of shopping in an affluent ambiance been presented as such a cheerless and somnambulant activity. We are far removed from the nineteenth-century arcades of Paris and other cities, the remote architectural ancestors of today's megamalls. It was within these expansive and well-lit interiors that the mobility and sensory stimulation associated with the intertwining of strolling, shopping, and looking produced part of the template for a modernized observer. But unlike that earlier modern appetite for stimulation and continual novelty, perception in Dubai is diffused, deflected away from visuality. Despite the ornamented and commodity-saturated spaces, things here seem anything but novel. They are as if frozen in a moment where everything has already been seen before, even though this repetition doesn't quell the habit of buying useless and unnecessary things. But if some of the logic of conspicuous consumption persists, it is now only one part of the operations through which identity is constructed and modified. The omnipresent cell phones are evidence of the never-ending labor of managing and enhancing one's virtual self. Time that once might have been spent in reverie or daydream (or even actual thinking) is now deployed in continually updating one's connectedness to the specific digital flows of affect and information through which a sense of loneliness or irrelevance is momentarily allayed. At stake here is not the overused notion of an attention deficit but of an attentiveness that migrates and is apportioned between the fluctuating points of attraction and solicitation that make up the increasingly dispersed framework of one's life. There is nothing condescending in Sternfeld's understanding of this world in which he too, with his iPhone, is fully embedded. A quiet empathy pervades the visual record of his own nomadic itinerary through these spaces and among its other visitors. In this regard, Sternfeld shares a sensibility with the acclaimed Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke, who has portrayed the dislocations of globalization in terms of individual human dispossession, for example in his films The World (2006) and Still Life (2008). Both Jia and Sternfeld show the individual caught between the derealization of urban space and the dematerialization and separation inherent in the pervasiveness of mobile information technologies.

iDubai takes on additional resonances and meanings when positioned against the larger patterns of Sternfeld's work over the last two decades. As one of the great visual poets of our time, his images of American subject matter constitute a penetrating and matchless portrait of this country at the turn of the millennium. In much of this work, Sternfeld reflects on the deterioration of both the social and ecological fabrics of our lives, but he never relinquishes a Whitmanesque sense of the reservoirs of spiritedness and hope that endure in the land and within individuals, families, and communities. Sternfeld has a wondrous ability to infuse his images with a temporal depth: the present tense of his photographs is layered and breathing with the histories and memories which pervade a given view or prospect. Sternfeld's art is deeply redemptive in its refusal to forget the myriad labors, passages, and losses that are always part of what remains to us and part of the ground from which we create a collective future.

With this in mind, the climate-controlled malls of Dubai might seem an unlikely theme for Sternfeld in that they present an extremely restricted and shallow physical environment as well as an effacement of its own dense history. Of course, he was aware that this was a place or landscape where the information-rich large format approach might not be suited, and his use of the iPhone has created its own rhythms and visual syntax. Nonetheless, it is a project fully interwoven intellectually and aesthetically with the work represented in three recent books: Sweet Earth: Experimental Utopias in America (2006), When It Changed (2008), and Oxbow Archive (2008). Taken together, they make clear the inseparability of social and environmental concerns in Sternfeld's outlook. For him, every landscape or prospect discloses some particular praxis or set of decisions about how people will live together and about how groups of people will choose to exist and thrive on the planet. The choices that are made around these questions go back to the earliest discussions by philosophers and religious leaders; and the utopian communities represented in Sweet Earth are remarkable evidence of the enduring pertinence of what Aristotle and others saw as the central question of oikonomia: how should we live and how should we manage what we have? Whether or not all the communities whose memories are sustained in Sternfeld's book may have had workable answers to these questions is not the point. Rather, what is important is that they were or continue to be active sites of testing, questioning, thinking creatively about human needs and how they can best be met by inventing arrangements of living and working. Dubai is related to these places of experiment as a crystallization of diametrically opposed ideas. It can stand for a glittering and impoverished parody of utopian imagery, barely masking a hierarchically designed and imposed world conceived around the need for maximization of profit and the fabrication of a global brand. The possibility of community is structurally impossible and a limited span of unessential needs are created and incited.

At the same time, iDubai is inseparable from the unsettling images and information that Sternfeld brilliantly assembled in When It Changed. In his somber collective portrait of climate change scientists, environmentalists, politicians, and NGO activists, we see a piercing visual record of individuals coming together to address those very problems of oikonomia on a planetary scale: to determine how (or if) we can change the ways in which we live and manage our resources to patterns and practices that are supportable and not annihilating. Dubai is immediately relevant because it is such a conspicuous instance of some of the profligate and ruinous uses of people and resources that have contributed to global environmental crisis. Most significantly, it is a world in which what is inert is privileged over the living, in which whatever grows or ages is ultimately out of place. Something as basic as food, which we see as lettuce displayed in plastic containers at a snack bar, seems incongruous in its perishability as well as unfathomably remote from the realities of its cultivation. Or there is a deceptively simple image of a water fountain set in a tiled alcove: it forces us to ponder what inefficient and wasteful means have been deployed to bring immense amounts of water to this ecologically disastrous enterprise. But amid the shallow unlivability of this environment, Sternfeld has been able to find some images of human resilience and cultural durability. In fact, it is in the palpable incompatibility between the inert and the living that we find a layer of hopefulness in this project. Sternfeld impels us to reflect on the social values of sustainability and conviviality, both of which are crucial to the necessary work of imagining alternate futures.