| Bill Owens
Professional habits from his stint as a newspaper photographer drastically shaped the style of Owens' pictures for Suburbia. Most of the major American documentary photographers of and before Owens' time (Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, and Diane Arbus) made it their stylistic goal to produce photographs that could stand alone, that is, pictures whose meanings within a larger American social context were immediately self-evident. Owens' style was precisely opposite. As a reporter, he was to produce a visually pleasing but highly malleable photograph, an illustration without a context that would support whatever angle its accompanying story wanted to take, and thus become a document only after receiving the proverbial caption. What makes Owens' work unique is that he chose a subject matter already wryly related this style of decontextualized press photography. Press photographs of public figures or foreign lands are often contextless because their subjects are usually in the news for complex events that one or two captured instants simply cannot recount in detail. At their best, press photographs work the surface of their subjects to convey their droll or dramatic character in the midst of a sensational event.2 Owens' deft irony arises, then, from his 'making news' out of a cultural landscape where nothing newsworthy ever happens.3 If photojournalism is designed to reinforce the 'otherness' of its subjects in the news, Owens encourages us to stop identifying with people who are doing things we probably do every day, whether we live in the suburbs or not. In effect, whenever we look at Owens' work, we are made to identify his subjects as people of another culture and not our own. No matter how much of the suburban cultural landscape Owens manages to collect, his style effectively prevents us from learning what it feels like to live in the suburbs and not somewhere else. |