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 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.
Because the images of Lee's time in Pie Town are available in high resolution
form from the Library of Congress, I was able to get close to Lee's images
on a pixel level. For me, working with photographs and editing them so closely
in Photoshop is a kind of an intimate act. Zooming in and carving a feminine
jaw out of a masculine one, or manipulating the touch of one woman's hand
on another's shoulder is a way for me to access and merge my desire with
figures which would have otherwise remained frozen in time. I've begun to
think of Photoshop itself as my medium - I'm fascinated by the fact that
it shares qualities with both photography and drawing. This work creates
something that reads as a photograph, and is infinitely reproducible like
a photograph, but at the same time depends heavily upon the intervention
of my hand.
My Pie Town [view
images]