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Bill Owens

(American, b. 1938)

In the late 1960s and the 1970s, as suburban development expanded rapidly in the United States, Bill Owens carried out a groundbreaking photographic study of suburban life in Livermore, California, where he worked as a staff photographer for the local newspaper. His first book, Suburbia (1973), depicted events such as neighborhood barbecues, Tupperware parties, PTA meetings, and garage sales, and featured people in their homes and yards as they watered their lawns, watched their children, or dipped into their liquor cabinets. A seminal portrayal of a burgeoning way of life, the book received immediate critical acclaim and has influenced a generation of photographers. Following Suburbia, Owens looked beyond the domestic sphere to examine other facets of suburban living, eventually publishing three more books on related topics. MoCP has recently acquired selections from Suburbia and Owens’s fourth volume, Leisure, which was finished around the same time but remained unpublished until 2004.

As numerous artists and critics have observed since the release of Suburbia, the novelty and impact of Owens’s photographs stem from the fact that he saw mundane elements of mainstream life as worthy photographic material, and then, improbably, delivered images that make banal moments seem both familiar and extraordinary, or even downright peculiar. Owens thought of himself as visual anthropologist of sorts, setting out to document the world he lived in, and his photographs have a direct and unembellished style. Nevertheless, they reveal a deadpan sense of humor and a complex, even confounding mixture of irony and empathy. Owens has stated, “The people I met enjoy the life-style of the suburbs. They have realized the American Dream,” and his pictures are exuberant and largely optimistic. At the same time, Owens courts the fact that an ideal can take on tarnished or even farcical manifestations in reality, and in many of his images elements of humor and pathos converge.

Owens began to pursue photography while serving in the Peace Corps and started working as a photographer in 1968, following his return to the United States. Since then he has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (1976) and a National Endowment for the Arts award (1977) and his photographs have been widely exhibited at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; International Center for Photography, New York; National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; and Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris. Despite an established reputation, Owens withdrew from the public eye and in 1983 he founded Buffalo Bill’s Brewery in Hayward, California—one of the first brew-pubs in the country. In recent years Owens has returned to photography and an eponymous monograph will be published by Damiani later this year.

- Karsten Lund