Bill Owens: Before the dissolution of our marriage my husband and I owned a bar. One day a toilet broke and we brought it home, 1971
Bill Owens’s 1973 book Suburbia offered an extended photographic portrait of the primarily white, middle-class communities in San Francisco's East Bay. Anthropological in orientation, the pictures are sympathetic and censorious, provoking recognition, humor, and anxiety in contemporary viewers.
Writing about his childhood on suburban Long Island in Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education, Michael Pollen observed that, “In the suburbs, the front lawn is, at least visually, a part of a collective landscape; while not exactly public land, it isn’t entirely private either. . . . The backyard [is] its private aspect. In the back, you could do pretty much whatever you wanted.” Owens's image of a woman watering a planter made from a toilet, centrally displayed in her backyard, exemplifies this idea in the extreme.
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Bill Owens: Before the dissolution of our marriage my husband and I owned a bar. One day a toilet broke and we brought it home, 1971