“My parents came through the Depression,” he told me. Coming from the same sort of agricultural community that the new developments were devouring, he might have resented their upwardly hopeful inhabitants, but he says he didn’t. Owens, who is now 72, grew up on a farm in Citrus Heights, near Sacramento. The décor might seem odd and the subjects might appear a bit disoriented, but the pictures have a relaxed intimacy that invites the viewer to look these new suburbanites in the eye, not down at them. His portraits were not news, but given the style and the subject matter, they were definitely new: they personalized a national aspiration and gave treeless neighborhoods the feeling of pioneer settlements. Owens is a “keen and sympathetic observer of the daily rituals of life amid tract homes,” the Los Angeles Times later wrote. Within the decade two sequels, Our Kind of People (1975) and Working (I Do it for the Money)(1977), followed.

(Most recently, the picture was added to a new edition of Ken Light’s Witness in Our Time: Working Lives of Documentary Photographers.) oberSoon private collectors and museums, including the Museums of Modern Art in San Francisco and New York City, were buying his work. The Ferguson portrait became one of the most evocative images in Suburbia, a collection Owens published in 1972 to considerable acclaim. I just said, ‘Richie!’-bang, took the picture-and you’re done.” “The body language is just right,” Owens would later tell an interviewer, “and I didn’t pose him. He recognized the lad as 4-year-old Richie Ferguson. One day in 1971, he was leaving just such a stop in the town of Dublin when he spotted, in the next-door driveway, a crew-cut kid in cowboy boots riding a Big Wheel and holding a plastic rifle. “I would go to houses in the East Bay where sometimes there was just no picture,” he told me. On weekends, he made pictures for himself-most of them portraits that reflected that dream. Over time, Owens got to know the people in the new houses, and he discovered their devotion to the American dream-“three kids, the dog, the station wagon, the boat,” as he puts it. “But I still had to come back with a picture.” “I worked all week taking pictures for the newspaper, which often sent me to places where there weren’t any images,” Owens recalls.

In those clusters of cookie-cutter tract houses, freshly painted and sodded, Owens faced a daunting task. Bill Owens spent the late 1960s and early ’70s as a photographer for the Livermore Independent News, a thrice-weekly newspaper serving towns and communities east of San Francisco Bay, some of which were being swallowed by new housing developments.

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