Images courtesy Seph Lawless
Black Friday is a holiday for shopping, savings, and the mall. These days, you’ll find plenty deals online, but the bricks and mortar stores are still where the real super-saver cuts are found, compounded by the capitalist frenzy of camping outside stores to beat the masses to the limited amount of stock. The day, which kicks off the holiday shopping season, still likes to present a picture of bustling, jam-packed malls, but despite this shopping centres have not been looking as healthy in recent years.
Between the number of Americans who now prefer to online shop, an exodus from the suburbs into cities and the general decline of department stores, it’s no wonder that malls are having a hard time filling stores and are being abandoned. American photographer and photojournalist Seph Lawless has turned his lens to the ruins of the former pillars of suburban life to show what life after commerce looks like in his eerie photobook, Abandoned Malls of America: Crumbling Commerce Left Behind. Similarly to Joseph Mallord William Turner’s famous ruin painting, Tintern Abbey (1794), Lawless documents what happens to man-made structures when they lose their patronage and are reclaimed by wilderness.
See a selection of images from the book here:
All images courtesy of Seph Lawless.
Lawless‘ second book Abandoned Malls of America: Crumbling Commerce Left Behind is scheduled for release in Spring 2019.