Just as with every anthropological study, Suburbia estimates two entities at once: its particular subjects and their group. Owens'
photographs and quotations originate from a discrete collection of neighborhoods that
seamlessly and persuasively stand for all of suburban America. For a documentary
photographer to achieve this degree of generalization, he must restrict his perception to
those aspects of his subject which are common to the group. This is exactly what Owens
did, and we will discuss this later. What's important now is to understand that Owens,
in order to accomplish this feat of restricted perception, had to imagine the general
characteristics of suburbia before he began. Suburbia, therefore, is not merely a
documentary record of suburban America. It is a record of a prejudice. To an academic
audience at least, this type of record is what makes historians rather necessary.
This kind of record is also, I believe, what makes the present essay necessary. When
Owens elided the particularities of the Pleasanton neighborhoods in Suburbia in order to
'mean' all of suburban America, he prevented us from understanding how even one
house - even if it looks like ones built thousands of miles away - is a cultural landscape unto
itself. Suburbia, despite what Suburbia playfully suggests, is merely a category, not an
entity, like a family, or a neighborhood, or a town. With this in mind, I return to the scene
of Suburbia to document what Owens didn't recognize - the suburban home as an
individual cultural landscape. |
