LOS ANGELES.- The Museum of Contemporary Art presents the exhibit Bill Owens: Suburbia. The exhibition presents a selection of photographs from Owens’s classic 1973 book Suburbia, which captured Americans as they transitioned into home ownership and the great expanse of suburban life. The year 1970 marked the first time that there were more Americans living in the suburbs than anywhere else in the country. As cities became polluted, congested, and less hospitable to residential life, Americans embarked on an urban exodus toward the promise of low traffic cul-de-sacs, thick green lawns, and 4th of July block parties. Suburbia became shorthand for the quaint environment of tract homes and nuclear families, and photographer Bill Owens aptly used it to title his book of the same subject.

Beginning in 1968, Owens worked as a photojournalist for the Livermore Independent (a suburb of San Francisco) and photographed the surrounding environs for over two years. He worked systematically from a script so that his photographs were often premeditated so as to fulfill an overall vision. The result is a collection of intensely astute images accompanied by earnest narrative captions that poignantly reflect the spirit of the time. In 1999 Suburbia was reissued with a handful of new images and the inclusion of some never before seen color photographs from the period. At the time of publication, five portfolios of the black and white photographs were printed to complement the book; it is this portfolio, and six color photographs, that are included in MOCA’s permanent collection. A selection from these photographs will be on view in Bill Owens: Suburbia.