Bill Owens by Bill Owens


Bill Owens
Title : Bill Owens
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 8862080174
ISBN-10 : 9788862080170
Language : English
Format Type : Hardcover
Number of Pages : 224
Publication : First published March 1, 2008

A black-and-white photograph captures a woman, curlers in her hair and a baby in her arms, standing in a messy kitchen and saying, "How can I worry about the damned dishes when there are children dying in Vietnam?" California photographer Bill Owens is best known for his critically acclaimed series "Suburbia," which was published as a monograph in 1972, and has long been considered one of the classic photo books of the era. For this influential and evocative project, Owens simply shot friends and acquaintances in his Livermore, California, neighborhood and allowed them to speak for themselves. Ordinary people had rarely been so riveting.
A comprehensive monograph, this volume consists of several sections of work from 1969 to the present, opening at the height of flower power, with images of the Beat generation, Woodstock and the protests against Vietnam. Owens has always remained intrigued by America as a subject: there follows a series of images focusing on urban America, its endless grids and homogeneous cities. In his most recent photos, many of which are in color and previously unpublished, Owens reveals how suburbia has evolved in the last 40 years--from the friendly place he captured in the 1970s to one characterized by sprawl and anonymity.

Bill Owens Reviews

  • Jonathan Allen

    Got this on ebay for a couple of quid. I was well pleased. I knew the Altamont photos of the Hells angels beating some unseen person with sawn off pool cues, but had only seen one or two of the Suburbia shots before. Really good stuff. He has an obvious empathy with his subjects, and comes across as more involved than say, Martin Parr does. (Parr's intention s different I know, but the choice of subject matter invites the comparison) I think it is because he is a product of the same suburbia he photographs, and there is an understanding and affection to counteract the absurdities on display, at least I think there is. He has picked out things that to an insider at the time might seem pretty everyday, but to an outsider such as myself are just downright weird. He can't have been unaware of that dynamic.
    Excellent book. The later colour work is very good too. Somewhere between Parr and Friedlander for me. And that's quite a somewhere.

  • Tom Romig

    Despite a lurking Blue Velvet feel to the photographs, Bill Owens never mocks or ridicules. Irony abounds, yes, but irony is a useful tool for understanding and appreciating the zany sprawl of American life. Owens is an anthropologist with a camera--penetrating, surprising, honest, and engaging. The book opens with an appropriately suburban story by A.M. Homes (which, strangely, is riddled with punctuation errors), and closes with two short essays, one by Owens on the Altamont assignment that boosted his early career and the other by Claudia Zanfi on that career, with its ups and downs, with the most shocking down being the financial needs that led him in midlife to give up photography for beer brewing for a dozen years.