Bill Owens (born September 25, 1938) is an American photographer, photojournalist, brewer and editor living in Hayward, California. He is best known for his photographs of suburban domestic scenes taken in the East Bay and published in the book Suburbia (1973). Owens is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and two National Endowment for the Arts Grants.
According to 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."
Owens was born in San Jose, California and raised on a farm in Citrus Heights. He studied visual anthropology at San Francisco State College, dropped out and went on an around-the-world hitchhiking trip before finishing his education at Chico State College. He served in the Peace Corps in Jamaica and, upon returning to the US, 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 pictures showed American suburban life in Livermore. 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." 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." 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 photography books, and his photographs have been exhibited internationally and are in the collections of 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 went on to become a well-known beer brewer and publisher of American Brewer magazine. He founded Buffalo Bill's Brewery in Hayward in 1983, one of the first brewpubs to open in California since prohibition. In 2003, he 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.