 First edition cover | |
| Author | Bill Owens |
|---|---|
| Subject | photojournalism |
| Publisher | Straight 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).
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]
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.
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