Bill Owens Biography
Bill Owens is a Hayward, California-based American photographer, photojournalist, brewer, and editor. He is well known for his East Bay suburban home scenes images, which were featured in the book Suburbia (1973).
Bill Owens Age
Bill was born on 25 September 1938, in San Jose, California, United States of America. He is 85 years old as of September 2023.
Bill Owens Family- Education
Owens grew up on a farm in Citrus Heights, California, after being born in San Jose. He studied visual anthropology at San Francisco State College before dropping out and hitchhiking throughout the world before continuing his education at Chico State College.
Bill Owens Career
He is well known for his East Bay suburban home scenes images, which were featured in the book Suburbia (1973). Owens is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts Grants. According to a report in The New York Sun, “Owens is uniquely associated with suburbanites living in the tract housing developments that absorbed 60 million Americans in the decades following World War II.” He participated in the Peace Corps in Jamaica and, upon returning to the USA, lived and worked in the town of Livermore in the San Francisco Bay Area, as a staff photographer for a local newspaper. In 1973, Owens released the book Suburbia, whose photos revealed American suburban life in Livermore.
During the 1970s, Owens had a huge influence on portraiture, particularly portraiture of the middle class.Suburbia appeared in Andrew Roth’s The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century in 2001. Owens later rose to prominence as a well-known beer brewer and the publisher of American Brewer magazine. In 1983, he opened Buffalo Bill’s Brewery in Hayward, one of the first brewpubs in California since prohibition. In 2003, he established the American Distilling Institute, a professional membership organization and publishing house whose mission is “to promote and defend the art and enterprise of craft distilling.” As president of ADI, Owens has emerged as a key figure in the artisan distilling movement.
His photographs have been exhibited internationally and are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the San Jose Museum of Art, and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
Bill Owens Books
- Suburbia. San Francisco
- Our Kind of People
- Working
- How to Build a Small Brewery
- Leisure. 2005
- Anthology. 2008
- The Village
Bill Owens Awards
- 1976: Guggenheim Fellowship, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation
- Two National Endowment for the Arts Grants.
Bill Owens Net Worth
Owen has an estimated net worth of 2 million dollars.