Bill Owens: Suburbanites and Socialites at Mills College Art Museum

Today from our partners at Art Practical, we bring you Maria Porges’ review of Bill Owens: Suburbanites and Socialites at Mills College Art Museum. The author notes, “When I think about the tidal wave of changes that were moving through the political and sociocultural landscape at that time, there is something both tender and awful about the reality Owens captured. It is a reality we are fortunate to have a record of, as imaginary as it now seems.” This article was originally published on February 19, 2015.

Three girls carrying batons parade across hideous houndstooth wall-to-wall carpeting. They look focused on their practice; a fourth girl, dejected or maybe just bored, sits in the background by a wall of trophies (awards for twirling, possibly?). This black-and-white photograph from 1973 is one of thirty-three featured in Suburbanites and Socialites, a small but compelling research-driven exhibition at the Mills College Art Museum. The photographs—recently donated by Robert Harshorn Shimshak and Marion Brenner—were selected from Suburbia, Owens’s 1973 landmark book of images and text, later followed by Our Kind of People (1975), Working—I do it for the Money (1977), and, decades later, Leisure (2004).

In the early 1970s, when Owens took these pictures in and around Livermore, California, few photographers had shown an interest in portraying life within the vast sprawl of housing developments that would become home to sixty million Americans in the decades after World War Two. Having discovered photography during a stint in the Peace Corps, Owens took a job in 1968 as staff photographer for The Independent, a small newspaper in Livermore. Going out on up to six assignments a day made it easy to get to know the people, places, and events of the community Owens was documenting. Along the way, he became one of the most important chroniclers of his time, known for images so memorable that they have become part of our unconscious template for how suburbia should look.

Read the full article here.