Bill Owens

American, born 1938

BiographyBill Owens (American, born September 25, 1938) is a photographer
from San Jose, California known for his objective depiction of Post-War
suburban life in the San Francisco Bay Area. After serving in the Peace
Corps, he took a job as a photojournalist at a local newspaper, where he
began anthropologically capturing suburban culture on camera. Owens
is best known for his portrayal of the middle-class through black and
white photography, initially presented in a 1973 volume entitled
Suburbia, the first of four books dedicated to the American dream.
Regarded as the first quintessential photographic study of middle-class
suburban life and its daily routines and rituals, Suburbia was exhibited
extensively in museums and galleries in Europe and North America and
remains widely considered as one of the most progressive and powerful
essays in photography of the 1970s.
He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1976 and his work is included
in several national and international collections, including of MoMA,
New York; San Francisco MoMA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art;
National Museum of American Art, Washington D.C.; Bibliotheque
Nationale de Paris; and MoMA, Stockholm, in addition to many others.
He exhibits regularly with Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York and
Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco.

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