Overview
Bill Bamberger’s photographs explore large cultural and social issues of our time: factory closings and the loss of jobs, the need for affordable housing, and adolescents coming of age in an inner-city high school.
His first book, Closing:The Life and Death of an American Factory (DoubleTake/Norton, 1998), with Cathy N. Davidson, won the Mayflower Prize in Non-Fiction and was a semi-finalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He has had one-person exhibitions at the Yale University Art Gallery, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, the North Carolina Museum of Art, The Nasher Museum of Art, and the National Building Museum.
A trademark of Bamberger’s exhibitions is that they are first shown in the community where he has chosen to photograph, prior to the museum premiere. His projects are long-term and highly collaborative. Many include the design and construction of custom-made galleries sited in the very neighborhoods where he is photographing. At both the community and museum levels, he finds essential ways to include the people he has photographed in the production, design, and public programming surrounding his exhibitions.
