BILL OWENS

Untitled [Women Making Meatballs], ca. 1973

Gelatin silver print

Gift of Marion Brenner and Robert Harshorn Shimshak, 2012.14.15

Bill Owens is a photographer most known for his depictions of suburban life in Northern California during the 1970s from his series Suburbia. In this series, he focused on capturing a holistic story of people’s day-to-day lives rather than staging compositionally focused photographs. His interest in photographing the everyday may have stemmed from his fourteen years of work as a journalist for the Livermore Independent. In the town of Livermore during the 1970s, families were embarking on a modern life filled with new technology and clothes, which Owens captures in his photographs. The eight Owens images selected for this exhibition each show an unseen aspect of women’s labor, telling the story of how women’s lives were changing in the 1970s from domestic forms of labor, such as cooking and cleaning, to working outside of the home, where women could support each other, pursue an education, and become part of the typically male-dominated workforce.

—Mollie Schottstaedt