The middle class has no taste for art! I am not a great artist, but people think I am because I have long hair. Cape Cod, Massachusetts

1976, printed later

Leisure: The middle class has no taste for art! I am not a great artist, but people think I am because I have long hair. Cape Cod, Massachusetts, 1976, printed later. Bill Owens (American, b. 1938). Gelatin silver print; image: 16.3 x 20.9 cm (6 7/16 x 8 1/4 in.); paper: 20.2 x 25.1 cm (7 15/16 x 9 7/8 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of George Stephanopoulos 2020.326 Bill Owens began photographing while taking a visual anthropology course in college. He continued his systematic observation of human behavior and social structures as a staff photographer for a local newspaper and in personal photographic projects shot on the weekends. Leisure was the fourth such project, begun in the 1970s but not published in book form until 2004. Watching television was the most popular American leisure pastime in the 1970s.