sex, art, and politics

Debbie Grossman - Jessie Evans-Whinery, homesteader, with her wife Edith Evans-Whinery, 2010
From the series My Pie Town

In the spring of 1940, Russell Lee wrote to his boss at the Farm Security Administration, Roy Stryker, proposing to spend several weeks shooting Pie Town, New Mexico, a small settlement of homesteaders near the western edge of the state. […] 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.

I LOVE THIS. LOVE LOVE LOVE.

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