Bill Owens (b. 1938)
Jack in the Box: It’s hot under this costume. I am sweating the whole time I am out here. Every two hours I get a break and drink four Cokes and eat all the free fast food I want. The kids love the balloon animals I give away, and sometimes I get extra work making them at kids’ birthday parties. Livermore, California, c. 1973
Vintage gelatin silver print
From the "Working" series
Signed in pencil & in ink on mount verso; also annotated "Jack In The Box was photograph for the 'Working' book, 'Vintage print' in pencil on mount verso
Image size: 6 3/8 x 6 1/2 inches
Paper size: 8 x 10 inches (flush-mounted)
Mat size: 14 3/4 x 14 3/4 inches
Illustrated: Bill Owens: Working; fotofolio, NY; 2008, p.89 (variant)
Provenance: The Artist, 2014
Condition: Overall Excellent; one crease in upper right margin crossing into the upper right corner of image only by 1/16 of an inch, visible ONLY in raking light
Retail: $6500
BIO:
Bill Owens (born September 25, 1938) is an American photographer, photojournalist, brewer and editor living in Hayward, California. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1976 and two NEA Grants, he is best known for his photographs of suburban domestic scenes taken in the East Bay and published in the book Suburbia in 1973. According to The New York Sun, "Bill Owens is one of the very few photographers to have shot people in the suburbs to any great extent. There is a long, long list of photographers who made their reputations shooting in cities and a shorter but impressive list who made their names with studies of rural communities, but Mr. Owens is uniquely associated with suburbanites living in the tract housing developments that absorbed 60 million Americans in the decades following World War II."
In 2001, Suburbia was included in Andrew Roth’s The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century.
He has published other photographic books, and his photographs have been exhibited internationally and are in many collections including The Museum of Modern Art, Berkeley Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Jose Museum of Art and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
Collections:
Getty Museum
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Whitney Museum of American Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Center for Creative Photography
National Museum of American Art
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Los Angeles County Art Museum
Berkeley Art Museum
Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris
Museum of Modern Art, Stockholm
Oakland Museum
San Jose Museum
St Louis Art Museum
The Minneapolis Institute of Art
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Harvard University
Smithsonian Museum of American Art
Caisse des depots et consignations, Paris
Fonds National D’Art Contemporain, Paris
Fonds Regional des Pays de la Loire, France
Fonds Regional de Languedoc-Rousillion, France
Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland
Monographs:
Suburbia. San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1972
Our Kind of People. San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1975
Working: I Do It For The Money; Simon and Schuster, 1977
Documentary Photography, a personal view by Bill Owens: Addison House, 1978
Publish Your Own Photo Book. Livermore, California, 1979
Suburbia, fotofolio, NY, 1999
Leisure, fotofolio, NY, 2004
Bill Owens Photographs, Damiani, Bologna, 2007
Working, fotofolio, NY, 2008
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