Bill Owens
[Photographer, b. 1938, San Jose, California, lives in Hayward, California.]
The kind of photographs I do are not pretty pictures for the walls of your home, but instead say something about the walls of your home.
Photoshop is not in my vocabulary. I don’t need it because I have content.
I had no money. I couldn’t make a living. Then one day I found my Nikon under the seat of my car and I realized I wasn’t a photographer anymore.
I wouldn’t have ended up divorced if I had that security of a regular job. We were always hanging onto the edge. The next grant, the next book contract was always going to be the one to make it. It never did. Finally your dreams all crash, the dreams of communicating through journalism, through documentary photography.
(1984)
When someone sees me with a camera that weighs almost ten pounds, he assumes immediately that I’m a serious photographer.
I’d been traveling the world and suddenly I got to Livermore and I was in total culture shock. I had a wife and baby and everybody my age already had the house and the swimming pool and the two cars. I’m shooting the Rotary Club, the Junior Women’s Club and thinking, “Who are these people?” But I start to get to know them. I’d go out and shoot them for the newspaper and then think, “Man, I ought to go back and shoot this on my own time.” (On his book “Suburbia”)