Your take on Bill Owens is interesting. I had always read his pictures in Suburbia as vaguely disdainful of suburban values; but now that I look again, they do seem more nuanced and sympathetic — although still somewhat ambivalent. I suppose no one chooses to spend so much time doing something and being with a particular group of people without some affection.

I have to confess that the first time I saw Alec Soth’s series Sleeping by the Mississippi, I thought they were very classist. As with Niagara, the people in that series tended to appear marginal (for want of a better term). But the more I looked, the farther I got away from that reading.

Anyway . . .

“People have to live somewhere,” is usually how I answer folks who think that suburbs are evil. Personally, I’m deeply ambivalent about suburbia. Suburbs have their problems, as do cities and rural areas. It’s not hard to figure out why Americans want to live in them, though.

https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=11108885&postID=162370063365736256

Suburbia, in some circles, has been so damned as to be impossible to look at without some underlying tone of irony, satire or sarcasm (pick your flavor of snootiness). Take Bill Owens’ work. for example. I think it was made with a genuine affection, but today looks like its intended to point out the wackiness of suburban living.