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Owens, Bill (Photographer); Homes, A. M. (Contributor) & Zanfi, Claudia (Editor) : Bill Owens

Grafiche Damiani, Bologna, Italy, 2007

ISBN 8862080174

First Edition / First Printing. As New in No Dust Jacket, As Issued. 223 pages. Retrospective Monograph. One of the most important photography books of our time. The first and only edition. Published in a small and limited print run as a hardcover original only. The First Edition is now scarce. A brilliant production by Grafiche Damiani: Oversize-volume format. The book weighs 3 pounds. Photographs by Bill Owens. Text by A. M. Homes and Claudia Zanfi, who also edited the book. Printed on pristine-white, thick coated stock paper in Bologna, Italy to the highest standards. Without DJ, as issued. Presents "Bill Owens". Perhaps the most comprehensive retrospective of Bill Owens' work. A good deal of it has not been published anywhere before, too. "Bill Owens is best-known for his critically acclaimed 'Suburbia'. Owens simply shot friends and acquaintances in his Livermore, California neighborhood and allowed them to speak for themselves. Ordinary people have rarely been so riveting. This volume consists of work from 1969 to the Present, opening at the height of Flower Power with images of the Beat Generation, Woodstock, and the protests against Vietnam. There follows a series of images focussing on urban America, its endless grids, and homogeneous cities. In his most recent photographs, many of which are in color, Owens reveals how suburbia has evolved in the last 40 years, from the friendly place he captured in the 1970's to one characterized by sprawl and anonymity" (Claudia Zanfi). Bill Owens' aesthetic comes from the tension between being an insider and an outsider at the same time, from being someone who "fits right in" and is also deeply immersed in the California counter-culture that repudiated everything bourgeois and materialistic about suburban life. One way to describe his sensibility today is affectionate ambivalence, a rich, complex, late-modern aesthetic that also characterizes the work of Martin Parr at its best, whose work is indebted to Owens, and indeed, as this collection shows, Owens anticipated Parr by about two decades. An absolute "must-have" title for Bill Owens collectors. This copy is very boldly and beautifully signed in metallic-silver pen-marker on the title page by Bill Owens. It is signed directly on the page itself, not on a tipped-in page. This title is a contemporary photography classic. As far as we know, this is the only such signed copy of the First Hardcover Edition/First Printing still available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright, a pristine beauty. A rare signed copy thus. Bill Owens' "Suburbia" was selected as one of the greatest photography books in "The Photobook". One of the most brilliant American photographers of our time. A fine copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER BILL OWENS TITLES IN OUR CATALOG). ISBN 8862080174.

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