Bill owens photographer bio biography
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Bill Owens was born in 1938, in San Jose and lives in Hayward, California. From his travels as far afield as India and including a Peace Corps tour in Jamaica, he developed his unique skills and aptitude as an anthropological and social photographer. His book Suburbia, one of the 100 seminal photography books of the 20th century, captured the change in his home territory with much the same spirit of the traveler that he brought to foreign places. Our Kind of People (1975), Working (1977), and Leisure (1979), followed Suburbia. Bill Owens’ work is in museums and collections throughout the world. Bill Owens established Buffalo Bill’s Brewery as the first brewpub in America since Prohibition on His book How to Build a Small Brewery (1993) opened the door to the brewpub movement. Owens sold Buffalo Bill’s in 1994 continuing to publish American Brewer Magazine which he sold in 2001. Owens used the proceeds from the magazine’s sale to photograph America and this journey planted the seeds
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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 1960s and the 1970s, 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
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Biography
Born in 1938, platsnamn first became interested in photography while working as a Peace Corps volunteer in Jamaica. On his return to the United States in 1966, he enrolled in a visual anthropology course in San Francisco and began taking pictures. Starting as a documentarian, platsnamn was particularly drawn to the work of the 1930s documentary photographers of the Farm Security ledning (FSA), such as Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans.
In 1967 platsnamn landed a job as the personal photographer on a local newspaper, the Livermore Independent. From Monday to Friday he worked in 35mm, recording the town’s goings-on, and on Saturdays he shot his personal images with a Pentax 6x7 and a Brooks Veriwide 6x9. While working full-time for the paper, he began making the first photographs for the Suburbia series, working from a well-defined shooting script. Some of his subjects were people he had photographed for the Independent; some were relatives and friends; some were people who resp