Visual Abyss: Brian Ulrich's Dead Shopping Malls

We'll be filing this one under "Photo projects we wish we'd come up with."

For the last decade photographer Brian Ulrich has been working on Copia, an exploration of America's addiction to shopping and how it went boom and then bust.

"Initially," Ulrich says, "this project began as a response to the heated environment of 2001. The communal sense of grieving, healing and solidarity that broke down social walls as our nation grappled to make some sense of the tragedy of September 11th was quickly outpaced as the government encouraged citizens to take to the malls to boost the U.S. economy thereby equating consumerism with patriotism."

So Ulrich took to the malls, camera in tow, to see if people were heeding the call to shop. But like the megastores and mall multiplexes themselves, Ulrich quickly realized that this project was really, really big. For Retail he surveyed the pervasive mall culture of the Midwest and traveled to the shopping meccas of the country: Las Vegas, Mall of America and New York City. All of which led him to investigate the second life of new goods in his series Thrift.

Now--after the economy's bottomed out--Ulrich is completing his cycle with Dark Store, Ghost Boxes and Dead Malls. As lovers of modern architecture, we don't know what's more depressing: looking at just how ugly these buildings really are without the distractions of signage and shoppers, or knowing that they will just be left to decay. Ulrich shot a lot of different locations, but he's just one man; imagine how many more there are just like these. The parking lots and exteriors are eerily post-apocalyptic, but it's the vacant interiors, all lit up but completely devoid of life, that scare us the most. See all the images on his website, and consider following through on that photo project you've been kicking around in your brain for the past however many years: check out one of 3rd Ward's 16 different photography classes.

Now for those images.

-- Perrin Drumm