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Bill Owens: Photographing the Suburban Soul Interview by Robert Hirsch Bill Owens's Suburbia (1972) is a quintessential photographic study of suburban California life and of its rituals. Owens followed with Our Kind of People (1975), which examined political, religious, scholastic, and sports groups and their practices. Then he published Working: I Do It for Money (1977) that looked at people who work from nine to five. In 1976, Owens received a Guggenheim Fellowship and, afterwards, two National Endowment for the Arts awards. Between 1978 to the 1982 he was a freelance photographer and did work for magazines including Life and Newsweek. In 1982 Owens started Buffalo Bill's Brewery and published American Brewer Magazine (1984 - 2001). In 2004 Owens added to his visual anthropology cycle of the American middle class with the publication of Leisure: Americans at Play. Currently, Owens is making mini digital movies about America society. This piece is the result of conversations and emails between Owens and the author from December 2004 through March 2005.

Jessica Dimmock dove headlong freakin' into it. There she was, in 2004, all innocent and walkin' around, playing with her fancy new digital camera, still a student... then a chance meeting with the jail bound coke dealer, the door in the floor opened and into the rabbit hole she went. Into the darkness, into the-land-of-broken-childhood-dreams, into the pain, into the dead end, into the heroin-is-god parallel universe. The 9th Floor was waiting for her... and in she jumped. The apartment in NYC, 4 W. 22nd St, the place of the pain, the upside down world of the empty shell living… dead folks walking... it would become a second home of sorts for Jessica. There she was, in the fray. This was amazing for a photographer, right? Insane to have this opportunity of chance, a chance that would turn into a VIP pass to document the drug fueled descent, to document the decay, to have free reign in the world of dashed dreams... to make it, with open arms, to be accepted into this world of the barely living... amazing, wasn't it? Well, I guess that all depends on the way that you look at it… doesn't it. Let's hold our thoughts on that for a bit and let's get back to our story.

THEORY - "The Indecisive Moment: Frank, Klein, and 'Stream-Of-Consciousness' Photography" THE INDECISIVE MOMENT: FRANK, KLEIN, AND 'STREAM-OF-CONSIOUSNESS' PHOTOGRAPHY By Gerry Badger "Frank … and Klein brought to the decade a feeling for its woes which, in retrospect, synthesizes it for us. There hovers in their work an oppressive sense of the odds against which people struggled, the dismal mood and chance of defeat that lowered the emotional horizon. This was all the more striking because of the general affluence of the period, underway shortly before the start of Frank's and Klein's major effort, in the great boom of 1955. These transplanted photographers found live and visual metaphors for the bleakness of this Cold War moment, and the deadness of the things in it. For those who remember the era, these photographic evocations of it have the keenest resonance; for those who came later, The Americans and New York offer a wondrous guide."

"William Klein and the Radioactive Fifties,"

Edward Hopper interview, 1959 June 17, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Interview with Edward Hopper Conducted by John Morse June 17, 1959 The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Edward Hopper on June 17, 1959. The interview was conducted by John Morse for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

INTERVIEW: "Frank Horvat with Joseph Koudelka"

"The Passion of Walker Evans" By: Daniel Mark Epstein, New Criterion, March 1, 2000 America's infatuation with photography has thrived upon its easy accessibility. By 1903, the year Walker Evans was born, George Eastman had made the roll-film camera so cheap that soon no family reunion or Sunday picnic need ever lack a "photo artist" to immortalize it. Amateur camera societies and photo exhibitions sprang up in cities and towns from coast to coast. And while professionals like Alfred Stieglitz fought for "the serious recognition of photography as an additional medium of pictorial expression," arguing that the photographer's gift, like the painter's, was privileged vision, the larger public remained quite content with the belief that one person's photo was pretty much as good as another's.

Interview with Bruce Davidson, The Kojo Nnamdi Show (WAMU/Chicago), November 2006 Q: You're on the streets of Chicago, wandering into Pentecostal churches, how did that initial roaming around, years ago, play out later in life? BD: I think that I was a born loner. My mother was a single parent, working in a torpedo factory in the Midwest, and I didn't like school. I felt very isolated. And so I could do both my reading and my writing at the same time, with a camera. Q: And that is what became the trajectory for the rest of your life. I want to go to 1961, because even as I look at the book "Time of Change", I think it was before you ever rode with the Freedom Riders that you got a job to shoot fashion models. And you got caught-up in that - it was quite glamorous. But at the time, your heart wasn't really in it, was it. BD: In 1959, I photographed a Brooklyn gang for a year. And when that was published, Alex Lieberman at Vogue asked me if I'd like to do fashion. He'd been told by Cartier-Bresson that I could do fashion because I could do gangs - it doesn't make a difference. So I began to do fashion to support other things I wanted to do. But my heart wasn't in it. The models were too tall and too sophisticated for me, and I'm a sloppy dresser.

THEORY: "Susan Sontag - On Photography" "Susan Sontag - On Photography" By: David L. Jacobs, Afterimage, Sunday, March 1 1998 The initial critical reception of Susan Sontag's On Photography (1977) is one of the most extraordinary events in the history of photography and cultural criticism. No other photography book, not even The Family of Man (1955), which sold four million copies before finally going out of print in 1978, received a wider range of press coverage than On Photography. The scores of reviews of Sontag's book extended not only across the spectrum of specialized photography and art magazines - that is, from Popular Photography to Artforum - but also across an expansive range of general-interest and intellectual periodicals from the Christian Science Monitor to the Village Voice, from Esquire to Encounter, and from the Saturday Review to the Antioch Review. What's more, On Photography won the National Book Critics' Circle Award for 1977 and was selected among the top 20 books of 1977 by the editors of the New York Times Book Review.

THEORY: "Through a Glass, Darkly: Photography and Cultural Memory" Through a Glass, Darkly: Photography and Cultural Memory By: Alan Trachtenberg, Social Research, Saturday, March 22, 2008 "I don't know why a Replicant would collect photos - maybe they were like Rachel - they needed memories." In the role of the bounty hunter Rick Deckard in Ridley Scott's 1982 cult classic, Blade Runner, Harrison Ford utters these words with a bitter edge. Assigned to "terminate" the beautiful Rachel, an "android" especially menacing because she's almost (almost!) indistinguishable from a "real" person, Deckard lusts after her and wants to be sure she's human, not machine-made, before bedding her. Based on Phillip K. Dick's brilliant science fiction novel of 1968, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? the film adds the bit of sentiment about collecting photographs to the otherwise unmitigated darkness of Phillip Dick's vision of a near future. The year is 2021, and by means of mechanical replication--the electric sheep of Dick's title--warm-blooded animal life has been all but totally replaced by replicants, copies or duplications of almost forgotten originals. Memories of real sheep and toads and living human flesh are struggling against the irresistible tide of a programmed second-order reality unburdened by personal or cultural memory.