April 26, 2000

'Suburbia': The continental subdivide

By ROGER ANDERSON Scripps Howard News Service

SUBURBIA, by Bill Owens (Fotofolio, $29.95)

At first, everything looks very bare - bare to the point of transparency.

The flat lawns, the empty sidewalks and driveways, the vast skies above the rooftops, the few human beings in their jeans and shirts and shifts - the scenes depicted in Bill Owens' "Suburbia," a book of photos first released in 1973 and now available in a new edition, are almost painfully familiar to anyone who has ever lived in or visited a typical postwar housing development.

The more you look, though, the less bare the scenes become. From somewhere - maybe from the cities, farms and small towns the people left behind, or from their secret thoughts, or from the extended families that are conspicuous by their complete absence (not an uncle, an aunt, a grandpa or grandma in sight) - life dribbles in past the frames of the pictures and fills the images with poignancy, humor, and love.

The book's re-release, complete with a few words of introduction by David Halberstam, coincides with a new interest in suburban life occasioned by the film "American Beauty" and our culture's ongoing effort to make sense of this brave new postwar lifestyle.

Owens, a photojournalist, found himself in the late '60s and early '70s living with his wife in a Northern California community that had plopped into existence only recently. In his spare time he assiduously documented the life he saw.

Elliptically, he underlines each image with a sentence or two of commentary that seems to have been uttered by the subjects themselves.

"My husband, Pat, has a theory about watering our newly seeded lawn," says a caption below a pleasant looking woman in pedal pushers holding a baby in one arm and hosing her new lawn with the other. "The water has to trinkle from heaven and fall like tender little rain drops ... otherwise the lawn won't grow properly."

All around her is wet dirt. In the background are stark brown fences, empty yards, and then a hazy expanse of hills and fields.

Is the woman's husband some kind of demanding nut? Maybe he's actually a poetic soul much preoccupied with the lawn's well­being. Either way, she's clearly humoring him.

As the images fill up with story, you may start to feel protective of the people in the pictures. They seem all too well set up for the jibes of city people and snobs, whose first reaction, perhaps, will be to look askance at these clueless tract yokels and their spartan surroundings.

"We've been married two months," says a caption beneath a man and woman about 30 sitting on a divan, "and everything we own is in this room."

What they own are the divan, a coffee table holding a plate of goodies and a couple of coffee cups, end tables stacked with magazines, a floor lamp - and some kind of rug or tapestry on the wall depicting a windjammer approaching island shoals where fishermen angle in choppy waters beneath a squadron of sea birds.

It’s the sheerest kitsch, you think. But the more you look at the photo, the further the windjammer and the fishermen advance into the foreground. After all, this is where the young couple came from - a migration of people across seas to virgin lands, colonies, developing cities, wars, and finally housing subdivisions.

"This is our second annual Fourth of July block party," says a caption under a panoramic photo of neighbors barbecuing on a cul-de-sac under a declining late-afternoon sun. "This year thirty-three families came for beer, barbecued chicken, corn on the cob, potato salad, green salad, macaroni salad, and watermelon. After eating and drinking we staged our parade and fireworks."

Everyone in the neighborhood seems to have come out for the affair, because on the surrounding streets not a soul stirs. It's like a bittersweet gathering of survivors after a neutron bomb has been dropped.

And maybe survival is what the book is all about - people who have survived the death of an old world of cities, small towns and farms and are making their way as best they can through a new world of new houses, new lawns, and new families.

Roger Anderson is arts and entertainment editor at Scripps Howard News Service.

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