You can't take pictures in the mall. Not in the stores or out of them. If you wanted to capture an image of the place so many of us spend so much time and money, you'd have to do it secretively, with James Bond equipment or your telephone. The employees or the security guards will shoo you out if they see you framing a shot, maybe even demand you erase your photos. The idea is that you could be doing some sort of very public reconnaissance for future larceny.

Once, as a retail worker, I had to throw a troop of Girl Scouts out of my store for taking pictures. Their leader had invented an elaborate treasure hunt where they would find the locations where a series of photos had been taken. As they left the store dejected, my manager chased after them and demanded the film from their camera. No kidding.

I stopped thinking it had anything to do with theft. Because there are office buildings and restaurants where I've been chastised for pulling out a camera. Self defense makes a handy excuse, but I think corporate America worries that the camera will steal its soul.

Corporate America, after all, under the cover of darkness will transform itself completely and deny that a change has occurred. When I worked in the mall, some days we would come in before even the MallWalkers to make over the entire store with new posters and merchandise and sale specials. Yesterday we loved heavy metal, but today the copy of Guitar World bemoaning alterna-rock and Metallica's new haircuts gets shoved to the bottom of the rack. Motorhead? Never heard of 'em. Have you heard the new Nirvana CD? It's totally ironic.

No one else got to capture the store and pin it down at one point in time. Like Dorian Gray, it was reborn each morning at 10am in the bloom of its youth, never dated, always looking its best and decked out in the brightest, newest stuff. We took photos every great once in a while. We were in control. We could be sure they were destroyed when next the time came to disavow everything before this.

We need to believe, and they need us to believe, that our malls are the ones on TV, where all the boys are lettermen and all the girls wear a size 4. If we take pictures of how the myth plays out, no myth will be left. We'll have the evidence before us, and corporate America's carefully posed self-portrait will have to compete with reality. Our little cameras could steal the dream they're selling and destroy it. That's what they're afraid of.

Corporate fear of cameras is truly regrettable, but rational and sensible nevertheless. There are real and good reasons behind the no-photography policies, and even for the seemingly ridiculous extreme to which some companies execute them. Corporations being as utterly stupid as they are, this lesson had to be learned the painfully hard way and so is burned deep into the corporate mentality.

One reason is industrial espionage. The hackneyed caricature of the middle-aged Japanese man with a camera taking pictures of everything in sight did not originate with the out-flooding of yen-rich Japanese tourist of a few decades ago, but rather with the wave of Nikon-totting male Japanese students and businessmen of the 50s and 60s. Those men with the ubiquitous cameras and rolls of film were mostly experienced engineers in various fields. They were welcomed into American factories and design houses by executives and engineers, friendly and secure in their naive yet fatal sense of untouchable superiority to these smiling, bowing toy makers. Their pictures provided much of the technology needed to take Japanese industry from makers of cheap wooden toys to an international powerhouse of heavy industry and electronics manufacturers in less than a decade. That was both insult (humiliation, really) and injury to American corporations, and both pains linger to shape corporate behavior today.

Another reason, though less colorful and historical, is simple cost and convenience. The no-pictures policy is easy to make and enforce, yet simplifies management and reduces costs by eliminating any legal problems that may arise from photographs taken on corporate property. As property owner's, the corporation may be liable for what happens on their premises. In business, any choice between no-trouble and possible-trouble (no matter how slight or unlikely) is always a no-brainer.

A third consideration is the privacy of individuals. Employees may object to having their pictures taken. Customers may not like others seeing where and with who they are shopping.

To call this policy a fear is prejudicial and rather unfair. It's simply a rational business decision. Nor is it limited to American businesses of course; you'd encounter the same or worse in other countries as well, but it is a good guess that it started in the U.S. It is now a common aspect of international corporationism. Should we fear this kind of possibly? Probably. Some of those inalienable rights of man are left at the door when you step onto private corporate property.