Adherents to this new perception rejoiced when Bill Owens’ Suburbia was published in 1973. Composed of photographs of and quotes by his neighbors in the Livermore/Pleasanton area of California, Owens’ book is an amusing portrayal of persons and families enjoying unsophisticated and regretless lives. To their critics, this absence of refined suffering capitulated the shallowness of suburban life. While Owens’ work is today afforded more complexity, the book unapologetically presents itself as wry comment: each lighthearted photograph plays as the "set-up" to a joke completed by a shrewdly chosen "punchline" below it—a short quotation apparently uttered by somebody in the picture.
Today, Suburbia enjoys a rather wide audience largely because its late-sixties kitsch has ripened; it also endures because it professes to be documentation. Suburbia is incredibly similar to and significantly more authoritative than The Brady Bunch,1 its more famous suburban counterpart, if for no other reason than that it was made using real ingredients. In fact, it is hard to imagine a richer cultural landscape artifact, given its self-conscious intention as a document of its particular time and place, and its success at capturing the personalities of people who lived there. One might say that to a general audience, Owens appears to have done, in his own epoch, most of the work that normally makes historians necessary. |
