Bill 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.