Bill Owens

Starting in 1972 with his career-making series “Suburbia,” Bill Owens has made it clear that he’s down with the burger-and-brew set. That black-and-white and color series of the now-vanishing American middle class has been on view in several recent exhibitions, a durability that tends to obscure the fact that Owens continues to create images from a “just-folks” perspective. The nine recent digital photographs in Owens’s current show, “Flesh,” reveal a consistent interest in appetites and physical pleasures and a visual wit reminiscent of Martin Parr. Four of the pictures are juicy close-ups of pork—a still life of pig snout in a French butcher’s case, a crispy slice of bacon, a middle-aged guy hungrily chomping on a rib, and a perversely sexual view of roasted pig. Two others focus on lingerie, including a view of a Vanessa Beecroft–like army of reedy mannequins in Prada panties installed in the foyer of the designer’s flagship Manhattan store. Another captures viewers checking out the naked and abundant Leigh Bowery in the Lucian Freud painting at the Met. That these images stem from travels beyond suburbia doesn’t seem to weaken Owens’s unique voice. Rather, he offers something of an American international perspective, in which the stuffy museum is made commensurate with a carnival poster of a green demon ravishing a curvaceous naked lady. The pictures also suggest that Owens’s shift to digital photography has enabled him to fully engage a personal quest to slake his voracious appetite for images.