Using Photoshop, Debbie Grossman cleverly altered photographs
of rural homesteaders in Pie Town, New Mexico, taken by Russell Lee for the
Farm Security Administration. The original images from 1940 were intended to capture
the hardy, pioneering spirit of rural America. Grossman was drawn to the
utopian ideal of community in Lee’s images, but as a modern, queer woman, she
saw there would have been no room for someone like her in Pie Town. Grossman’s
pictorial intervention creates an alternative history in which the Pie Town homesteaders
are entirely women, and the town’s families—as in this photograph— are headed
by same-sex couples.