Born in San Jose in 1938, Bill Owens was raised on a farm, then joined the Peace Corps, shipping out to Jamaica. He took a camera with him and learned how to use it. When Owens returned to Northern California to study visual anthropology, at San Francisco State University, the school was in the throes of an anti-Vietnam revolution and he photographed the mayhem. In 1968, the Livermore Independent offered him a $1,500 grant and a job as a photojournalist. Owens purchased a Pentax and settled into small-town life. His approach to photography was not so much documentary as a study in style, and his subjects included industrial buildings, fast-food joints, coiffed suburban dames, and parking lots full of shiny cars. One hundred and twenty photographs from those early years were eventually collected in Suburbia, a book that made history when it was published, in 1972. A 50th-anniversary exhibition of the book holds images from Owens’s entire oeuvre, from the Peace Corps to the present day. —Elena Clavarino