Bill Owens

Bill Owens (born September 25, 1938) is an American photographer, photojournalist, brewer and editor living in Hayward, California. He is best known for his photographs of suburban domestic scenes taken in the East Bay and published in the book Suburbia (1973). Owens is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts Grants. According to The New York Sun, "Owens is uniquely associated with suburbanites living in the tract housing developments that absorbed 60 million Americans in the decades following World War II." Biography Owens was born in San Jose, California and raised on a farm in Citrus Heights. He studied visual anthropology at San Francisco State College, dropped out and went on an around-the-world hitchhiking trip before finishing his education at Chico State College. He served in the Peace Corps in Jamaica and, upon returning to the USA, lived and worked in the town of Livermore in the San Francisco Bay Area, as a staff photographer for a local newspaper. In 1973, Owens released the book Suburbia, whose pictures showed American suburban life in Livermore. The Los Angeles Times commented that the book "rouses pity, contempt, laughter, and self-recognition. Owens’s influence was immense during the 1970s, especially with respect to the kind of portraiture that shows the middle class." In 2001, Suburbia was included in Andrew Roth’s The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century.