On 8 April 1961, the passenger ship Dara sank near Dubai, and 238 people were lost; many were never found. Olivia Arthur’s Stranger begins with this event, then departs from the conventions of documentary reconstruction. She imagines one of the missing returning to Dubai half a century later, using that impossible homecoming to consider a city transformed beyond recognition.

History here becomes the foundation for a speculative photographic narrative. The returning figure occupies a world of ghosts, reflections and mirages, while Dubai’s growth is viewed through the intertwined forces of aspiration, gold and exploitation. Arthur does not treat the disaster as an isolated episode. Instead, it becomes a point from which to examine disappearance, memory and the unstable experience of encountering a place that is at once familiar and estranged.

The book’s material construction is integral to that idea. Photographs printed on transparent stock overlap and pass into one another, creating images that are never entirely self-contained. Earlier and later pages remain partially visible; one moment is haunted by another. In this oblong hardcover, the page sequence turns transparency into a narrative device, giving physical form to the book’s uncertainty about time, presence and return. Across 224 pages, the reader must continually negotiate what lies before, behind and between the images.

Published by Fishbar Books in 2015, the first edition was issued in 1,000 copies. Its interest for a serious photobook collection rests not simply in its subject, but in the precision with which historical event, imagined viewpoint and book design are joined. Stranger is a particularly focused example of the photobook as constructed fiction: photography, sequencing and paper work together to make the past visible without pretending that it can be recovered intact.