The Home That Jack Built

By R.Z. Sheppard

Photographs by BILL OWENS Unpaged. Straight Arrow. $15.00. $5.95 paperback.

The baby was born with a stainless-steel spoon in its mouth. It is still there, full of creamed corn, held by Mom, who is plump and pretty. Dad stands slight ly to the rear, a large drink held confidently against an incipient paunch. As gathered by the lens of Bill Owens' cam era, the scene is a family portrait abounding in casual miracles.

A molded plastic papoose is propped on what looks like an unscratchable table top whose resins have been stroked into a semblance of rose wood or walnut. A bowl of wax fruit pledges eternal ripeness. An imitation slate counter neatly divides the family room from the kitchen area. Through an expanse of sliding glass doors, the electric company's pylons can be seen striding across the valley, a step ahead of the subdivisions.

The place is the Livermore Amador Valley of California, a community of split-level haciendas 40 freeway minutes from San Francisco. It is suburbia, the material goal men seem to have been inching toward ever since Neanderthal times. For Americans it is the last flush card of the New Deal. "We're really happy. Our kids are healthy, we eat good food and we have a really nice home," say Mom and Dad. The statement is as matter-of-fact as a fried egg.

But against millennia of rumbling stomachs, pain and despair, the words bear unself-conscious profundity.

Bill Owens lives in Livermore and works as a photographer for the Livermore Independent. Starting four years ago, he began taking hundreds of pictures of his neighbors and listening to them sound off about their comfortable world. Nearly everyone seems high on protein and possessions. "We enjoy having these things," says one man who is seated in a garage containing one car, one speedboat and two motorcycles. Another good credit risk boasts of seven cars and two motorcycles in his family. Things share equal billing with people in these photographs. Things also seem to be equally demanding. "I bought the Doughboy pool for David and the kids, and now no one wants to take the responsibility for cleaning it," one father remarks mournfully as he scoops debris from the large plastic tank. Neatness counts. A youth, balancing in the boughs of a scrawny tree, is picking dead leaves. "My dad thinks it's a good idea to take all the leaves off the trees and rake up the yard. I think he's crazy."

Hot Dog. Two minority families have made some sacrifices to live in the suburbs. A black mother misses "black cultural identity" for her family. "Here," she says, "the biggest cultural happening has been the opening of two department stores." Chinese restaurants have not yet reached the valley. A Chinese family of six is shown on a Saturday night making do with hot dogs.

Owens pokes his camera into drawers and refrigerators with a point of view somewhere between satire and affection. "To me nothing seemed familiar, yet everything was very, very familiar," Owens explains. He makes the readers see things that way too, in part by combining his sly imitation of the amateur snapshot with great technical skill and disturbing clarity. His pictures and deadpan comments are like a dream within the American Dream whose meaning is that our most important truths may exist only on the surface.

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