Bill owens photography biography
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BILL OWENS
Bill Owens was born and raised in California. After volunteering in the Peace Corps he picked up photography and began his journey as a documentarian. While living in Livermore, California in the late 60’s, he worked as a photographer for the local newspaper. He became increasingly interested in the suburban areas that became heavily populated after WWII. Owens started photographing middle-class America and would eventually publish a best selling book, Suburbia in Suburbia is considered one of the most important photography books to date. He went on to publish three more books, Our Kind of People, Working, and Leisure, focusing on the suburbanites of America.
Owens was the recipient of the Guggenheim fellowship, which he received in He was also awarded two National Endowment for the Arts grants.
Between working commercially and on personal photographic projects, he opened one of the first microbreweries in the country. In the past
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Photographer, Brew Master, Publisher: Bill platsnamn
Comes Full Circle
by Doug Lang
Bill Owens gained notoriety for his photo essay Suburbia, but photography wasnt paying the bills. So, in , Owens sold most of his camera verktyg and tucked the photographs from Suburbia under his bed. platsnamn parlayed his hobby as a brewer into one of Californias first brew pubs, and later launched American Brewer Magazine which he runs today.
Suburbia fryst vatten a behind the scenes look at the American dream, documenting the life and times of the suburban dweller. The photographs were shot in Livermore Californias Amador Valley in For anyone who lived in the suburbs during the 70s, the pictures from Suburbia are like looking in a mirror.
Fast forward 27 years. Suburbia has been republished and the San Jose Museum of Art is currently presenting an exhibit of photographs from the book. Theres renewed interest in his work, and Owens has decided to pick up his camera agai
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“To me, nothing seemed familiar, yet, everything was very, very familiar. At first I suffered from culture shock. I wanted to photograph everything, thousands of photographs. Then slowly I began to put my thoughts and feelings together and to document Americans in Suburbia. It took two years. The photos in this book express the lives of the people I know. The comments on each photograph are what the people feel about themselves.”
— Bill Owens, statement for Suburbia
The earliest suburbs in the United States were founded around the turn of the century, but in the decades following World War II suburban development exploded and the suburbs were soon home to the majority of Americans. In the late s and the s, in the midst of this boom, 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, depicted events