Bill Owens
Born in San José in California in 1938, Bill Owens initially started out on a career as a photo reporter, working for the “San Francisco State Daily Gator” as well as for the “Livermore Independent”, both in suburban areas typical of the part of California where he lived. It was on the basis of these experiences that his most famous work saw the light: Suburbia, created between 1970 and 1972 and then published in 1973, which enjoyed extraordinary public success. Through the Suburbia photographs, albeit with a sense of participation and irony, Bill Owens recounts the practices and conventions of the American middle class, using an iconographical language influenced by the traditions of documentary photography, and enhances the images with comments made by the subjects themselves.
His Roadtrip is a journey through the Sundance Festival and around Los Angeles, characterized by his usual ability to grasp the pictorial and often grotesque aspects of everyday life in provincial America.
