Press, Patty Hearst Trial, San Francisco, California

1976

Working: Press, Patty Hearst Trial, San Francisco, California, 1976. Bill Owens (American, b. 1938). Gelatin silver print; image: 16.1 x 20.6 cm (6 5/16 x 8 1/8 in.); paper: 20.1 x 25.2 cm (7 15/16 x 9 15/16 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Gift of George Stephanopoulos 2019.296 In his examination of people’s attitudes towards their jobs, Owens gives us the subjects’ own words to accompany his images of them. The series was not as much a critique as a mirror that allowed people some distance from which to view their situation. This and his other projects conveyed both the comfort of suburban middle-class life and an undercurrent of dissatisfaction and disillusionment with it. There was a serious decline in job satisfaction in America in the last half of the 1970s.