08/31/2026
WILLOW BEND, 2026
This one sits somewhere between two sides of my creative life.
Photo Pit Dreams has increasingly become a way for me to document culture and the spaces that hold it. LIMINAL is rooted in music, but the name has always resonated with that state between what was and what comes next.
The Shops at Willow Bend in Plano is living in exactly that space now.
I spent the afternoon exploring Willow Bend with my wife, Dr. Liz Warren, and fellow photographer Mandy Duncan, documenting the mall before redevelopment changes it permanently.
Shopping malls were built for commerce, but became something larger: places to work, wander, eat, meet friends, kill time, and grow up.
I wasn’t trying to create a technical record of the building. I photographed the feeling of being there, walking through a place that was still alive while already becoming a memory.
Storefronts have been stripped while their fixtures remain. Cosmetics counters sit without products or customers. Behind an unlocked door, remnants of Claire’s sit almost frozen after the store moved out. Blackout film conceals enormous vacant spaces, peeling away in places just enough to see inside.
A former retail space has found another life as a practice room for a community theater company. People and businesses remain while other parts of the mall disappear behind gates and blacked-out windows.
These photographs preserve that transition and the physical traces left behind as a particular kind of American social space changes into whatever comes next.
Some places vanish long before the buildings come down.
đź“Ť The Shops at Willow Bend
Plano, Texas
August 2026
Photographed while exploring with Dr. Liz Warren and Mandy Duncan.
TECH NOTE: Sony A7R III with a TTArtisan 50mm f/1.4 Tilt and Rokinon 14mm f/2.8. The selective and shifted focus was created optically in-camera with the tilt lens, not with Photoshop or Lightroom.
Photo Pit Dreams | DFWdfw
DrLiz Warren
Mandy Duncan
The Shops at Willow Bend
