Debbie Grossman, Jessie Evans-Whinery, homesteader, with her wife Edith Evans-Whinery 2010 This series of works entitled My Pie Town, is an amazing re-imagination of Russell Lee’s collection of images, taken on behalf of the United States Farm Security Administration in 1940. Lee’s documentary work - of life in PieTown, New Mexico - is typical of work sponsored by the FSA in Depression-era America. Documentary, mythologizing, nostalgic - an attempt to capture small, rural communitites whose ‘innocent’ way of life was under threat (from financial crisis, from the lure of the city etc). Grossman, oddly enough, shares a similar concern to Lee, 70 years later - a nostalgic longing for community - but has taken Lee’s work and mutated it for nefarious lesbian purposes. Yay. Using photoshop, she has altered the world of PieTown to create an ‘imaginary, parallel’ world populated entirely by women. Like the Fae Richards Photo Archive, 1993-96 (a series of ‘faked’ images of an African-American lesbian film star from the same era by lesbian photographer Zoe Leonard), this series is part of larger cultural project to re-imagine histories in the face of historical exclusion: “I take a selection of Lee’s beautifully-photographed body of images and re-imagine, revise, and reconstruct them using Photoshop. The archive I have created resembles Lee’s with an important difference - in My Pie Town, the rag-tag community of homesteaders is populated exclusively by women. In some of my revisions, I have taken male bodies and rendered them to look like masculine women; in others, I have taken pairs of women, shifted their distance and body language, and brought them closer to create a sense of intimacy. In some of the pictures I have created women so masculine, or so ambiguously gendered, that they may not, for some viewers, clearly read as one gender or the other. I’ve also left a few images untouched, allowing for another dimension of re-reading Lee’s work.”

Debbie Grossman, Jessie Evans-Whinery, homesteader, with her wife Edith Evans-Whinery 2010

This series of works entitled My Pie Town, is an amazing re-imagination of Russell Lee’s collection of images, taken on behalf of the United States Farm Security Administration in 1940. Lee’s documentary work - of life in PieTown, New Mexico - is typical of work sponsored by the FSA in Depression-era America. Documentary, mythologizing, nostalgic - an attempt to capture small, rural communitites whose ‘innocent’ way of life was under threat (from financial crisis, from the lure of the city etc).

Grossman, oddly enough, shares a similar concern to Lee, 70 years later - a nostalgic longing for community - but has taken Lee’s work and mutated it for nefarious lesbian purposes. Yay. Using photoshop, she has altered the world of PieTown to create an ‘imaginary, parallel’ world populated entirely by women. Like the Fae Richards Photo Archive, 1993-96 (a series of ‘faked’ images of an African-American lesbian film star from the same era by lesbian photographer Zoe Leonard), this series is part of larger cultural project to re-imagine histories in the face of historical exclusion:

“I take a selection of Lee’s beautifully-photographed body of images and re-imagine, revise, and reconstruct them using Photoshop. The archive I have created resembles Lee’s with an important difference - in My Pie Town, the rag-tag community of homesteaders is populated exclusively by women.

In some of my revisions, I have taken male bodies and rendered them to look like masculine women; in others, I have taken pairs of women, shifted their distance and body language, and brought them closer to create a sense of intimacy. In some of the pictures I have created women so masculine, or so ambiguously gendered, that they may not, for some viewers, clearly read as one gender or the other. I’ve also left a few images untouched, allowing for another dimension of re-reading Lee’s work.”