A guy at the flea market told me to shoot the ceiling tiles too, and it changed how I document malls

Reese Wells · 2026-09-29T09:25:04.627973+00:00

I used to walk into a dead mall and just shoot the big stuff, the escalators, the fountains, the empty anchor stores, and call it a day. Then about 8 months ago I was at a flea market in Ohio selling some prints and this older guy who used to shoot for a local paper flipped through my whole album and just shook his head. He told me the ceiling tiles tell you more about when a place closed than anything on the floor does, because nobody ever pulls them out, so the water stains and the light fixtures and the old smoke detectors just sit there like a date stamp. I went back to the same mall I'd shot 6 times and got maybe 30 frames in 20 minutes just pointing up at the grid. The brown ring on a tile above a food court tells you where a leak was never fixed, and the office supply store's dropped ceiling versus the 1980s grid in the hallway gives you two different build-outs in one shot. Now I always do a full lap with the camera pointed at the ceiling first, then work down, and my sets feel way more complete. Anybody else shooting up or am I the only one weird about tiles now?

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A guy at the flea market told me to shoot the ceiling tiles too, and it changed how I document malls | Dead Mall Explorers - Librear