Bill Owens- "why make a book"

Submitted by Nathan_Bennett on Mon, 10/08/2007 - 11:54pm.

ASMPNorCal Event

Start: 12/04/2007 - 6:00pm

End: 12/04/2007 - 9:00pm

At BlueSky Studios, 2325 3rd Street, San Francisco Social hour 6-7 PM Event- 7-9 PM $10 ASMP members, $20 non-members

BILL OWENS defined our suburban lives in the early 1970’s with his memorable, unadulterated photographic book Suburbia (1972). While working as a photographer at a local newspaper, Bill Owens set out to document these newly implanted communities that began to reflect a new lifestyle for America. Suburbia became the first of many explorations by artists that recorded the banal but wondrous modern world. The Los Angeles Times commented that the work “rouses pity, contempt, laughter and self-recognition. Owens’s influence was immense during the 1970s especially in respect to the kind of portraiture that shows the middle class.”

Bill will show past and present work, answer questions and discuss the ins and outs of making a photographic book. This will be an event to remember!

Three other photographic books have been published since Suburbia: Our Kind of People (1975), Working: I Do It For The Money (1977), and Leisure (2004). He has received a Guggenheim fellowship and two NEA Grants. In 2001, Suburbia was included in Andrew Roth’s THE BOOK OF 101 BOOKS: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century. Bill Owens is included in Photography A Cultural History, 2002 and THE PHOTOGRAPHY BOOK, 1997. His photographs have been exhibited internationally and are in many collections including The Museum of Modern Art, Berkeley Art Museum, Los Angeles County Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Bill Owens is represented by James Cohan Gallery in New York.

For a complete biography, go to

billowens.com