“CAN YOU AVOID SUBURBIA?”

OWENS, Bill. Suburbia. (San Francisco): Straight Arrow, (1973). Oblong quarto, original photographic stiff paper wrappers. $1700.

Early edition of the pioneering photobook, boldly inscribed on the half-title, “Pat, Can you avoid suburbia? Bill Owens,” with 96 pages of black-and-white halftones, many paired with captioned quotes that add to the book’s “indelible poignancy” (New York Times).

"Almost every photo in Suburbia repays attentive looking, with details that turn an average photo into a great one… A groundbreaking exemplar of documentary photography" (New York Times). In Suburbia, Bill Owens accomplished an "exemplary, no-frills documentary tone… one of the most popular and successful American photobooks of the 1970s" (Parr & Badger II:24). "Suburbia is too sympathetic and too conflicted to be simply another ironic deadpan document… This delicate balance of outsider and insider perspectives turns the resulting book into a critical self-portrait—one that's almost painfully observant but withholds judgment" (Roth, 224). First edition, second issue, preceded by December 1972 edition. Open Book, 296.

Images clean and bright; light edge-wear to original wrappers. A near-fine copy, scarce inscribed.