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.

Bamberger is a Philadelphia native and grew up in Long Island, New York, and in Yardley, Pennsylvania.

He was a Morehead Scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, graduating in 1979 with a degree in American studies.

His main interest in college was originally writing, but he discovered photography and took several classes.

Bamberger says, "I chose to be a photographer because this was, for me, the most effective way of telling stories."

After college, he remained in North Carolina, working as a photojournalist with a local newspaper.

Bamberger says, "In those days, I did film and printing, and I found every bit of it engaging."

His photographs have been in many publications, including Apeture, Doubletake, Duke Magazine, Fortune, Harper's Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, Time, Vogue, and The Washington Post Magazine.

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 taught in the Folklore Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and is currently a lecturing fellow at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

As a documentary photographer, Bamberger feels it is important to get consent from his subjects.

He says, "With portraits, I try to capture a central element of who we are as an individual. When I'm preparing to do a portrait, I think of the expression that defines that person. With the landscape work, I pay close attention to lighting and exposure."

His work has been compared to that of German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher—a mid-twentieth-century duo who often photographed industrial relics.

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.

He has had solo exhibits at the National Building Museum, the Nasher Museum of Art, the National Museum of American History-Smithsonian Institution, the North Carolina Museum of Art, and Yale University Art Gallery.

His work is also on display in United States embassies.

Bamberger's first significant project documented a cross-section of people living in Durham County, North Carolina from 1979 to 1982.

This project received funding from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.

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.

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".

Another reviewer notes the artistic quality, saying, "The gentle natural light of the factory interior captures workers, products, and machinery in an elegiac yet unsentimental memorial. This is documentary work of a high order, a corrective to triumphalist cybercratic boosterism, and above all a reminder of the ambiguities and ironies of family values."

Closing was part of an oral history and documentary photography project funded by a North Carolina Humanities Council grant and coordinated by the Southern Oral History Project and the Mebane Arts Council.

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.

A related book was also published.

In 1994, the Lyndhurst Foundation in Chattanooga, Tennessee asked Bamberger to document "in human terms the impact of home ownership on the lives of families" in three neighborhoods where the Chattanooga Neighborhood Enterprise had built or renovated houses for lower-income people.

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.

This expanded Bamberger's work into Eastern North Carolina.

He also spent six months in San Antonio, Texas, where he lived in a Mexican-American neighborhood that included houses built by Habitat for Humanity.

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."

The gallery traveled from 2002 to 2003, going from San Antonio, Texas, to Oregon to North Dakota, and ending in Chapel Hill.