How Liminalism Became the Defining Aesthetic of Our Time

"Had Century III Mall in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania not closed seven years ago, the shopping center - the third-largest in the world when it opened, with 200 tenants - would be approaching its 50th anniversary. Anchored by defunct local department store chains, including Joseph Horne Company, Gimbels, and Kaufmann's, Century III had been constructed atop a slag heap - a mound of metallic industrial detritus produced as part of the steel-making process - maintained by US Steel. With a name meant to evoke the bicentennial of 1976, the mall made it four decades before finally closing like so many similar shopping centers throughout the country. Today, all that remains are the shells of a Sears, a Macy's furniture store, and a food court, all set to be demolished soon. It's the sort of nexus that writer Matthew Newton describes in Shopping Mall(2017) as a "ghost mall": "places where past, present, and future simultaneously collapsed.""

"In an image posted by Dave Columbus to the Facebook group "liminal photography" on November 11, 2025, the sheer eeriness of the abandoned mall is evident in all of its forlorn splendor. Gray-carpeted and white-walled, the back wall features a '70s color scheme of painted orange-and-green squares. The image exemplifies the popular internet aesthetic of "liminality": the exploration of spaces that appear "in between," that are uncanny and uncomfortable despite being mundane or familiar. Emptied of stores and absent of humans, Columbus's photograph captures the melancholic discomfort of liminal aesthetics - the strange, simultaneous pull of disquiet and nostalgia that makes this bottom-up, crowd-curated digital movement among the most pertinent and explicit artistic reactions to the strange, surreal experience of living in"

Century III Mall in West Mifflin, Pennsylvania opened as one of the world's largest shopping centers and later closed after decades, leaving only retail shells and an empty food court slated for demolition. The mall was built atop a slag heap and anchored by now-defunct regional department stores. The term "ghost mall" describes such sites where past, present, and future collapse together. A photograph by Dave Columbus posted to an online liminal photography group exemplifies the aesthetic: gray-carpeted, '70s color schemes, and emptiness. Liminal photography explores uncanny, in-between spaces, producing melancholic nostalgia and acting as a bottom-up digital artistic response to late-capitalist urban decline.

Read at Hyperallergic