Debbie
Grossman's commentary on her work, My Pie
Town, via her website
"My Pie Town reworks and re-imagines a body of
images originally photographed by Russell Lee for the United States Farm
Security Administration in 1940. Using Photoshop to modify Lee's pictures, I
have created an imaginary, parallel world - a Pie Town populated exclusively by
women.
"In this
work, 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".
For comparison check out "Savouring Russell Lee's Pie Town 2005" @ Americansuburbx
Image by Debbie Grossman, 2010. Jessie Evans-Whinery, homesteader, with her wife Edith Evans-Whinery and their baby
