With the shopping mall culture fading, I wonder what future generations will have to remember it by. Sure, there will be corporate photos, and a.... With the shopping mall culture fading, I wonder what future generations will have to remember it by. Sure, there will be corporate photos, and a few advertisements (although ads don’t often depict the monotonous buildings), but the reality of the age is likely to die with the memories of those who knew them.

I have little, if any, nostalgia for shopping malls. The notion of the mall memory demise came to me while viewing an exhibit of postcards collected by Walker Evans, now on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Many of the photos are of busy shopping streets in towns across the U.S. Evans was a photographer, and writer, who collected the cards before he took his first photograph, and would photograph many of the scenes depicted in the cards.

The scenes in the cards might look like the way things were, but as in our memories, it’s not. People have been added, airplanes are flying in between skyscrapers and the colorization not only makes everyday sunny, but makes day night and because they were often colored in Germany, can make limestone red.

In an article on display with the postcards, Evans says “The postcard is a folk document. Studying them, it is better to renounce the sentimentality and nostalgia, that blurred vision that actually destroys the reality of the past.

“Downtown,” he says, “was a beautiful mess.”

More about the exhibition