Debbie Grossman (b. Rochester, New York, 1977)
At the end of the Great Depression in 1940, Farm Security Administration (FSA) photographer Russell Lee documented the small New Mexican community of Pie Town and its residents. Lee’s work was part of a government-sponsored project to document the struggles and self-sustaining spirit of rural American families. Nearly seventy years later, in an act of simultaneous appropriation, homage, and critique, Debbie Grossman embarked on a project called My Pie Town, 2009–10.
Grossman saw Lee’s Pie Town images for the first time in Bound for Glory: America in Color, 2006, a collection of color images from the FSA and the Office of War Information. Today, the photographs are in the public domain and are available in high-resolution form on the Library of Congress’s website. Using Adobe Photoshop, Grossman reworked many of Lee’s photographs, inserting a crucial difference: in her images, Pie Town is populated exclusively by women.
In My Pie Town, Grossman modifies male figures from Lee’s portfolio, changing their facial features, posture, and body language; in some cases, she erases men from the image altogether. To create her version of the town, she researched anatomy and developed her Photoshop skills, manipulating appearances, softening jaw lines, and smoothing out skin. There is a lighthearted quality to Grossman’s reimaging which brings intimacy to the fore, offering a different type of romanticization from Lee’s archetypal representation of Western agrarian life.
Lee depicts the harsh realities facing this close-knit community of hard-working Depression survivors, in images that evoke a propagandist narrative about the American pioneer spirit. “Pioneering” takes on a different meaning in Grossman’s creations, depicting a utopian fantasy in which gender-fluid figures are redefining notions of family and community. These works give voice to queerness as a family model—not only today, but in an (imagined) history.
Debbie Grossman, Jessie Evans-Whinery, Homesteader, with Her wife Edith Evans-Whinery and Their baby, 2009–10. Pigment print. 13 × 19 inches. Collection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Museum purchase, The Friends of Art Endowment Fund. © Debbie Grossman