Bill Owens (photographer)

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."

Owens was born in San Jose, California. In 1973, he released the photographic book Suburbia, whose pictures showed American suburban life in the town of Livermore, where he lived at the time. The Los Angeles Times commented that the book “rouses pity, contempt, laughter and self-recognition. Owens’s influence was immense during the 1970s especially in respect to the kind of portraiture that shows the middle class.” 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, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, San Jose Museum of Art and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

Owens is a contemporary of photographers Mary Ellen Mark, William Eggleston, Joel Sternfeld, Stephen Shore and Lee Friedlander.

Owens founded Buffalo Bill's Brewery in Hayward in 1983, one of the first brewpubs to open in California since prohibition.

In 2003 Bill Owens founded the American Distilling Institute, a professional membership organization and publishing house "to promote and defend the art and enterprise of craft distilling." As the president of ADI, Owens has become one of the leading spokesmen of the craft distilling movement.