Off Center / On Stage

Published at the same time as Dubai hosts the World Expo, this book demonstrates that the city has long been a site of exhibition. Dozens of unpublished photographs fill this volume to examine Dubai in the 1970s, when a still small but growing population was working to create a bigger future. A new and illustrated essay by architect and writer Todd Reisz explores how more than just new buildings, ports, and roads were being assembled: Mythologies were also being made.

By first refuting the glib clichés directed at the city, Reisz then places the city into historical, even planetary, context. For the last several years, his work has been focused on documenting Dubai as a site of architecture and as a hub of the expertise that gets architecture built. Photographs by British architects Stephen Finch and Mark Harris have in the past helped Reisz to tell this history. Now with this full-color publication, the photographs take the foreground. For each image provided by Finch and Harris, Reisz reveals that photography is something beyond documentation; it can be a means of reckoning about what we can know and about what we can never recall, even of a city many think of as “young.”