Bill Bamberger

Bill Bamberger Jr. (born 1956) is an American documentary photographer, photojournalist, and author who captures social and cultural issues in America and around the world. Bamberger has been called a "master documentarian" and is known for "taking an intimate approach to his subject matter". His work has been featured in several books and in solo exhibits at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, the North Carolina Museum of Art, and the National Building Museum. He is a lecturing fellow at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

Background Bamberger is a Philadelphia native and grew up in Long Island, New York, and in Yardley, Pennsylvania. He has been interviewed on various television shows, including CBS Sunday Morning, C-SPAN2's About Books, and North Carolina People on PBS, as well as on All Things Considered on NPR.

Bamberger has shown his photographs at museums and galleries, both large and small. The variety is intentional as he likes to open his exhibits in his subjects' hometowns. For example, his show Closings opened in an old department store where his subjects lived in Mebane, North Carolina, before the show moved to the Smithsonian. The result was a book and an exhibit shown at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Duke University's Brown Gallery in the Bryan Center, the Reece Museum at East Tennessee State University, and the Morris Gallery of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory After more than 100 years of operation, a furniture factory in Mebane, North Carolina, closed down in 1993. Bamberger's photographic series documents the final days of work for the 203 men and women who crafted fine furniture at the White Furniture Company. He spent five months on-site in the factory and used 350 rolls of film to capture black and white and color photographs "of everyone and everything"—spending five years total on the project which included following the workers after the factory closed. One reviewer says Bamberger "offers an unusual glimpse into the lives of working-class Americans". The exhibit opened at the former Jones Department Store in downtown Mebane, and was also shown at the North Carolina Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, and the Yale University Art Gallery. For the project, he lived and worked with his subjects. After seeing that resulting photographs, the University of North Carolina sponsored, "This House is Home: An Initiative to Advance Affordable Home Ownership in America", involving college students and a national conference.

In 2002, Bamberger had the idea for "A House is a Home", a photo gallery inside a house that could travel across the country. Fabricated for $125,000 with the design help of Gregg Snyder of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, the mobile art gallery's "purpose is to foster a better understanding of the affordable home-ownership issue." He decided to focus on teenage boys as a way to explore coming of age, male identity, and toxic masculinity. One reviewer noted, "The effect is a compelling audio-visual mosaic of disadvantaged youth at an emotional crossroads." As he took color photos of the daily lives of people, Bamberger wrote, "I stopped thinking about the Rwandese people primarily as Hutus or Tutsis and as perpetrators or survivors. Instead, my photographs explore how the people of Rwanda are finding their way while faced with contemporary issues like healthcare, education, and housing."

Hoops Lasting fifteen years, the Hoops project includes more than 22,000 photographs of basketball hoops taken in 38 states in the United States and nine countries around the globe. The first photo of the series was taken in Nags Head, North Carolina.

Awards Bamberger won the Mayflower Prize in Nonfiction for his book Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory, produced with Cathy N. Davidson. Closing was also nominated for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award.

He was one of 56 American artists selected to participate in "Artists and Communities: America Creates for the Millennium", the National Endowment for the Arts millennium project.

Publications

Durham County Photographs. The Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art. (1982) Closing: The Life and Death of an American Factory (The Lyndhurst Series on the South). By Cathy N. Davidson and Bill Bamberger. W. W. Norton & Company (1998) . Boys Will Be Men: Photographs by Bill Bamberger at the Flint Institute of Arts May 17 – July 21, 2002. Flint Institute of Arts (2002). . Stories of Home and the Mobile Gallery: Photography, Architecture, Community. By Bill Bamberger and Gary Snyder. College of Architecture, University of North Carolina at Charlotte (2003) . Hoop. Forthcoming from George F. Thompson Publishing.

Personal Bamberger lives in Durham, North Carolina with his wife Alice Boyle. His photographs are sold through Anne Taylor Fine Arts.