The Decline of Mall Civilization

In 2010, I borrowed a scanner from a friend to digitize some old negatives and I came across ancient images capturing life inside shopping malls, a consumer culture that had been decimated by the Internet. I put the images online and they went viral. So I kickstarted a book, “Malls Across America”, and they went more viral. In a crazy twist of fate, that book ended up getting released by the publisher Steidl who printed the work that inspired those photos – books by William Eggleston and Robert Frank. Unfortunately, Steidl didn’t print nearly enough of the books, so the Kickstarter backers of that project, “Malls Across America”, were some of the few people who were able to get it. It has been out of print for 6 years now, and currently trades for upwards of $1000. At some point I want to re-publish that book, but for the time being it remains out of print and out of reach. At first I thought I would use some of the classic images in the new book, “The Decline of Mall Civilization”, but I found hundreds of other powerful images that deserved to be seen so we decided to keep it completely separate. The two books have very different feels as well. “Malls Across America“, which was designed by the incomparable Peter Miles, is all single images over double page spreads. This time we spent a lot of time and effort pairing the images into diptychs that play off of each other in interesting ways. We are incredibly excited to make “Decline of Mall Civilization” available.