Biography

In his renowned series of black and white photographs entitled Suburbia, Bill Owens captured the essence of the suburban lifestyle that permeated America in the 1970s. Like a visual anthropologist, Owens astutely recorded the customs, symbols, and social relationships that characterized middle-class culture in the Livermore-Amador Valley, just thirty miles east of San Francisco. Owens’s subjects ranged from grand vistas of tract homes to backyard barbecues and Tupperware parties, all of which, the artist explained, offered up a portrait of “ordinary folks doing ordinary things.”1

Owens was born in San Jose in 1938 and was raised on the outskirts of Sacramento in California’s Central Valley. After earning a B.A. in auto mechanics at California State University, Sacramento, and serving in the Peace Corps (1965–68), he took up photography and landed a job as a photojournalist for the Independent, a local Livermore newspaper. Owens documented his surroundings with the clarity of a true insider—his subjects were his friends and neighbors who willingly invited him into their homes. “To me nothing seemed familiar,” Owens said at first, “yet everything was familiar.”2 New homes, automobiles, civic groups, a safe community: all of these things brought great pride to Owens and his fellow citizens, but he also acknowledged that suburban culture was a “bittersweet … part of the American Dream [that was] not going to go away.”3

How, then, did Owens intend for us to interpret his suburban snapshots? Were they meant to celebrate or to critique the culture that surrounded him? Owens’s method of titling suggests an answer. Each of Owens’s photographs is accompanied by an extended quotation solicited by the artist from his subject. The captions, which are almost always earnest and deadpan, seem—in a humorous way—to acknowledge the happy-go-lucky attitudes of the suburbanites. However, the complicated meaning of the photographs is often layered in their subtext.

This photograph of three adolescent boys at a local recycling center bears the following title: It’s fun to break up the glass. We’re doing our thing for ecology and the Boy Scouts will give us a badge for working here. On the surface, Owens honors the spirit of volunteerism advocated by civic groups such as the Boy Scouts and the community pride such organizations promote. However, the photograph also suggests the environmental impact of suburban consumerism and the aggressive behavioral tendencies of the teenage boys. (In Owens’s published book, Suburbia, the image It’s fun to break up the glass shares a spread with another photograph of two young boys holding fake guns with the title: We like to play war.)

While Owens’s Suburbia series was never intended to indict the suburban lifestyle, the photographs raise important questions about the way we live and the impact we have on the world around us. Almost ten years after he created the series, Owens acknowledged that his photographs did have a deeper underlying significance: “I wanted to give an ecology message,” he explained in a 1982 interview, “We live in a fragile environment and we’re opting for ticky-tacky on the hill.”4

“I wanted to hold up a mirror for people to take a look at who they were,” continued Owens. “These people live rich, complicated lives, full of activities. I’ve attempted to be as straight and honest as I can be. … I’m looking for little truths.”5 Although the suburban lifestyle of the 1970s may seem foreign to viewers now, more than thirty years after Owens chronicled it, the Suburbia series encourages reflection on contemporary life, questioning just how much, if at all, it really has changed. —A.W.

1. Bill Owens, quoted in David Pagel, “Revealing a Picture of Diversity in Suburbia,” Los Angeles Times, 11 July 1996.
2. Bill Owens, Suburbia (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1973), 5.
3. Owens, quoted in Sam Whiting, “In Living-Room Color,” San Francisco Chronicle, 6 October 1996.
4. Owens, quoted in Alan Goldfarb, “Bill Owens—Man of Suburbia,” The Valley Times, 28 February 1982.
5. Ibid.

(SJMA Selections publication, 2004)


Bill Owens is a photographer and California native, born in San Jose in 1938.  He trained as a photographer and industrial artist at both San Francisco State College and California State University, Chico (B.A., 1963).  His work is featured in the collections of the University of California, Riverside; the Arnolfini Art Center, Bristol, United Kingdom; and the International Center of Photography, New York, and he is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts grants.  Owens currently lives in Hayward, California, where he works as both a photographer and distiller. (SJMA Collections Committee, 2011)

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