Bill Bamberger’s work explores large cultural and social issues of our time: the demise of the American factory, the dream of home ownership, 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), won the Mayflower Prize in Non-Fiction and was a semi-finalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award.
Widely published in both photography journals such as Aperture and general interest periodicals including Harper’s, Esquire, and the New York Times Magazine. Bamberger’s work has been supported by numerous foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Bamberger has had one-person exhibitions at the Yale University Art Gallery, the Smithsonian Institution, the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, the North Carolina 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 their museum exhibition.
His current project, Rwanda Reseen: 100 Days, a collaboration with photographer Jacques Nkinzingabo, explores modern-day life in Rwanda, 30 years after the Genocide.
Bamberger was a Morehead-Cain Scholar at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and currently teaches at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies.
Anthony, Flint Central High School from Boys Will Be Men