Photographer Bill Owens (born 1938) has spent his career taking pictures of “ordinary folks doing ordinary things.”1 As a visual anthropologist of American middle-class suburban culture of 1970s California, his images bear vivid witness to a particular time and place. A California native, when he met a photojournalist in Jamaica while serving in the Peace Corps he realized: “That’s me. I can do that.”2 Returning to the United States, Owens studied photography at San Francisco State, where he took pictures for the student newspaper. In 1968, he took a job as a staff photographer with a Bay area newspaper, the Livermore Independent.
Owens found himself in the midst of a social phenomenon: “everyone was moving to the suburbs. You could buy a house for $2000, with only $99 down—a two-car garage, a swimming pool, and a Kenmore washer and dryer, all of the things that come with the good life.”3 Owens was uneasy about the materialism and consumption that this new culture represented, feeling a keen sense of dislocation: “To me nothing seemed familiar, yet everything was very, very familiar. At first I suffered from culture shock.”4 He decided to visually explore the community in which he found himself. The three-year project would be “about my friends and the world I live in.”5
To understand the explosive growth of suburban life, he took a documentary approach:
My particular emphasis will not be on the traditional suburbs that surround major urban centers, but the new suburbia of the “instantly” developed tract communities. These tracts are dramatically transforming the smaller traditional rural towns into affluent, urban communities…. Most research attention is presently directed toward the dramatic social problems of minorities, urban education, violence, and social breakdown. My attention will, however, be directed to the phenomenon of isolation and entrenchment of the white middle class in the tract homes of the new suburbia. Photographs of people in the interiors of their homes will reveal the values of the middle class, because people in the privacy of their homes surround themselves with material creature comforts that reflect their values. By
photographing large numbers of families in their homes, one can gain the commonplace reality of suburban living.6
His work as a journalist not only gave him credibility with his subjects, but also had introduced him to many people he might photograph, but he also placed an advertisement in the paper: “I am doing a documentary on Livermore. Let me photograph your lives, your pets, your house, whatever. Call me, Bill Owens. I work at the newspaper.”7
Owens spent his weekends documenting the suburban landscape, making portraits of his friends and neighbors. To keep himself organized, he “put together a shooting script of events that I wanted to photograph…Christmas, Thanksgiving, Fourth of July, Birthdays, et cetera. I got a small grant, and began taking photographs every Saturday for a year, so basically Suburbia was shot in 52 days.”8 Using wide-angle lenses and flash, he shot roll after roll of film, working in black and white because he both preferred the neutrality, as well as the sharply detailed prints that resulted. The images were accompanied by quotations from his subjects. One frankly addressed the implicit materialism; “We enjoy having these things”9 Another commented on the anonymity of these communities: “I find a sense of freedom in the suburbs…You assume the mask of suburbia for outward appearances and yet no one knows what you really do.”10 The captions serve as time capsules of the period. The one accompanying a young couple feeding their baby in their orderly kitchen addresses the American dream that drove the suburbs: “We’re really happy. Our kids are healthy, we eat good food and we have a really nice home.” Suburbia, published in 1973, is the publication for which Owens remains best known.
He published two more books in the seventies. In Our Kind of People: American Groups and Rituals (1975) he studied the social behavior “of fraternal, social, and civic groups,”11 photographing more than 300 gatherings. For his third volume, Working: I Do It For the Money (1977), he explored the “vast number of ways people earn their living,” and how it shaped their identities. He drew on his network from the newspaper and the business community, as he wrote in his Guggenheim grant application: “I will use the yellow pages in the phone book. I will start by photographing an accountant and end with a zipper salesman.”12
Despite the considerable acclaim he received from his three books, he couldn’t make a living from publishing them. Laid off when the newspaper downsized in 1978, he sold his photography equipment and opened a brew pub. When Suburbia was reissued in 1999, it refocused attention on his seventies work, and he resumed photography in a digital format. The same subjects continued to interest him. Leisure: Americans at Play, which he worked on between 1973 and 1980, was finally published in 2004. Two other projects “After Suburbia” (1975–77) and “New Suburbia” (2006–07) enabled him to re-engage the subject with which he was most identified.
The 1977 portfolio in the Solari Foundation Collection is comprised of a group of eight photographs from three of his books. There are three each from Suburbia and Our Kind of People, and two from Working.
Betsy Fahlman
Bill Owens, We’re really happy. Our kids are healthy…, From SUBURBIA, 1977, gelatin silver print, 15.9 x 21 cm, SOLARI 94.005.003L