Suburbia (book)

Suburbia
First edition cover
AuthorBill Owens
Subjectphotojournalism
PublisherStraight Arrow Press
Publication date
1973 (revised 1999)

Suburbia is a book by Bill Owens, a photojournalism monograph on suburbia, published in 1973 by Straight Arrow Press, the former book publishing imprint of Rolling Stone. A revised edition was published in 1999 by Fotofolio (ISBN 978-1-881270-40-9).

Background

Owens photographed residents of Dublin, California, a small cattle town east of San Francisco whose population surged from roughly 1,000 to 25,000 during the 1960s.[1] Most of the images are black-and-white, shot with a wide-angle lens, and paired with captions drawn from the subjects' own words.[1]

Response

Art Seidenbaum wrote in the Los Angeles Times that the book was:

"a sort of black-and-white documentary which roused pity, contempt, laughter and self-recognition in me. Like Walker Evans' memorable photographic study of the Depression, you know these people are real. And what saves journalist Owens from being a snob or voyeur is that he includes himself in their middle-class midst."[2]

Ian Jeffrey later noted that:

"Owens's influence was immense during the 1970s, especially with respect to the kind of portraiture-by-agreement on show here."[3]

In 2001, Suburbia was included in Andrew Roth's The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century.

References

  1. ^ a b Ahrens, Frank (March 24, 2000). "The American Dream, Circa 1970: Suburbia Photographs Capture How Much We've Changed". The Washington Post.
  2. ^ Seidenbaum, Art (April 24, 1973). "Mom, Dad and Mortgage". Los Angeles Times. p. C1.
  3. ^ Jeffrey, Ian (2005). The Photography Book. Phaidon. p. 355. ISBN 978-0-7148-3634-8.


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