Dark Stores, Ghost Boxes and Dead Malls -- the New Project from Brian Ulrich

Target, Riverside, Illinois, July 2008
from the series Dark Stores, Ghost Boxes, and Dead Malls
© Brian Ulrich

If you haven't seen it yet, Brian Ulrich has a new project called Dark Stores, Ghost Boxes, and Dead Malls.
Although he hasn't yet officially premiered the finished work in its entirety, you can see some of the photos in a recent Time magazine slideshow as well as from the blog of Justin James Reed.
These cold and eerie large format images of abandoned big box retail stores not only fit perfectly with coinciding themes of consumerism and mass consumption in his pre-existing bodies of work (Copia, et. al.), but also hold a significant poignancy in the current economic crisis.
I've been a huge fan of Ulrich's work ever since I came across his series Copia a few years ago, and this newest project is of particular interest because I recognize some of its locations from many many years back. Its really fascinating to watch how economic changes get reflected on small, local levels. And to a certain extent, some of the woes that are currently being felt nationwide should've come as little surprise to us here in the Rust Belt: issues such as foreclosure and loss of retail have been happening here for at least a decade.
As a kid my parents would take us to Rolling Acres Mall in Akron (see Brian's image below), which at the time was considering one of the fresh newer malls in the area. And wow, as a five-year-old, I was super-impressed with the glass elevator, sprawling escalators, and fake foliage...all reasons why I really kinda chuckle when I look at Brian's photo now.

Rolling Acres Mall 1, 2008
from the series Dark Stores, Ghost Boxes, and Dead Malls
© Brian Ulrich

Fifteen years later, while in college, I returned to Rolling Acres to do a quick shoot about a storefront church that had opened in one of the abandoned retail spaces there -- of which there were a plethora even by that time. I think I remember them telling me that the mall was somewhere near 80-85% vacant; this was in 2002.But I was definitely interested in how people could re-use and reshape these spaces, just like I'll be curious to see what, if anything, will become of the growing number of similarly abandoned stores and strip malls in the near future. Architects, developers, urban planners and others have been debating and theorizing about this for some time, and I'm really wondering (or should I say hoping?) if we're now on the cusp of a profound paradigm shift on how these suburban-sprawl-based planning models will evolve in the coming decades, and how factors such as the current recession or the rapid depletion of fossil fuels will affect those decisions. Many, such as James Howard Kunstler, the provocative writer and outspoken critic of sprawl, are proposing that these spaces be reclaimed and redesigned to be inspiring centralized hubs of civic life.
As a quick aside, I love Kunstler's ideas. His book The Geography of Nowhere is a hilarious yet very serious treatise on the man-made landscape of suburban sprawl, which he has notoriously lambasted as "the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world." His TED talk is well worth a look:


Euclid Square Mall, another one of Ulrich's recent subjects, is also a spot where I made some photographs for a separate project in college. I remember it was an architectural theory class (little-known trivia fact: I wanted to be an architect before I caught the photography bug) and we all had to write a final essay for the semester. I chose to write mine on sprawl patterns contrasted between inner-ring vs. outer-ring suburbs, and had convinced my professor that since I was actually a photo major that it'd be more beneficial to my overall education if I could turn in a five-page essay plus 10 photos instead of writing the prerequisite 10-page essay. He agreed, and I set off for the aged, inner-ring suburb of Euclid, photographing the near-empty Euclid Square Mall and some of the desolate strip malls and storefronts along the main commercial corridors. I promised Brian I'd give a peak at those old images (circa 2001), though they definitely pale in comparison to his stuff:Anyway, I don't want to take away any further from his work, which was the reason I made this post to begin with. So, Brian, congrats! Can't wait to see more!