Cait Oppermann revisits her childhood by photographing a mall ready for demolition

Arguably the most distressing thing about growing up is that sudden realisation you reach one day that all the trappings of your childhood have disappeared – all the people you knew have aged, the places you went have disappeared and it’s impossible to ever go back. Bleak! But although this is a feeling we all feel at some point, very few get the chance to walk into their past and document it again.

But Brookyn-based photographer Cait Opperman took a trip home to Kansas City earlier this year and was able to do just that. Having visited a local film developer she found herself opposite a shopping mall that she and her mother used to visit in her youth, still operational but largely abandoned of all the shops she’d remembered. Filled with nostalgia she took her camera and tripod and shot the pink walls and fittings of Metcalf South with her mother in tow, capturing her memories of the past to preserve for the future – which was a stroke of luck as the mall has now closed permanently and is scheduled for demolition later this year.

So take that adulthood! Sometimes it is possible to relive your childhood years, even if it is only fleetingly.