Joel Sternfeld’s *IDubai* records the malls of Dubai through the device most closely associated with the era it examines: the iPhone. Sternfeld visited these interiors in 2008, photographing spaces shaped by consumption, display, and movement. The book’s central proposition is precise: an image-making tool identified with contemporary mobile life becomes the means of observing that life from within.

The project sets Dubai’s spectacular shopping environments against the history of the arcade. Where the nineteenth-century arcade signalled an early phase of capitalism, the mall appears here as a theatre of its advanced form—a carefully designed public space in which commerce, leisure, technology, and aspiration overlap. Sternfeld’s photographs look beyond the familiar mass-media image of Dubai as a polished fantasy and attend instead to the human presence within these interiors.

Jonathan Crary’s accompanying essay extends the book’s inquiry through the figure of the “phoneur,” the wired wanderer who communicates, browses, and photographs while in motion. That framework gives the work a significance beyond its location: *IDubai* considers how widespread phone photography changes not only personal experience but also the production of public images and news. Its method is therefore inseparable from its subject, producing an unusually direct relation between medium, place, and historical moment.

Published by Steidl in 2010, this 95-page English-language hardcover is a compact photobook with an exacting conceptual focus. For collectors, its interest lies in the clarity of its construction: a major photographic artist uses an everyday consumer technology to examine a newly forming visual culture, while the book preserves that encounter at the point when mobile imaging was becoming a social instrument. It belongs as much to the history of photographic practice as to the representation of Dubai.