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When the Studio Lights Went Out: What We Lost When Mall Portrait Studios Disappeared
A Sudden Darkness Across America I’ve been thinking a lot lately about April 2013—specifically, what happened when CPI Corp. shut down over 2,000 portrait studios in a single day. Those familiar blue backdrops, the standardized lighting setups, the wallet-size photo packages—they all vanished almost overnight. Most people probably didn’t notice. But for those of us who understand studio photography, it represented the end of an era. The Standard That Shaped a Generation What fascinates me about these studios wasn’t their sophistication—it was their consistency.