Debbie Grossman (born 1977) is an American photographer who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.[1] [2]
Debbie Grossman was born in 1977. She was originally from Rochester, New York.Grossman holds a BA in Women's Studies and Art History from Barnard College.[3] She received an MFA in Photography, Video, and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts, where she won the Paula Rhodes Memorial Prize.[3]
Grossman's work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,[4] the Museum of Fine Arts Houston,[5] and the Jewish Museum.
In her 2011 show, My Pie Town, Grossman created her best known body of work by manipulating photographs first created by Russell Lee of a small community of homesteaders in Pie Town, New Mexico.[6]
My Pie Town first showed at Julie Saul Gallery from April 14 – May 21, 2011.[7] In these images, Grossman reworks and re-imagines a body of images originally photographed by Russell Lee for the United States Farm Security Administration in 1940.[8] Using Photoshop to modify Lee's pictures, Grossman created an imaginary, parallel world – a "Pie Town" populated and governed exclusively by women.[6] [9]
Grossman first saw the Lee's Pie Town pictures in the book Bound For Glory and obtained high resolution public domain versions of them on the Library of Congress website.[10] Using sixteen of Lee's unpublished series on Pietown, a homesteaded community in New Mexico, Grossman took male bodies and rendered them to look like masculine women; in others, she shifted the body language of pairs of women, bringing them closer to create a sense of intimacy.[3] Grossman says of the project "I’ve begun to think of Photoshop as my medium – I’m fascinated by the fact this it shares qualities with both photography and drawing…..I enjoy imagining My Pie Town working as its own kind of (lighthearted) propaganda".[11] ..."[Lee's] pictures of the town are tinged with his mythologizing of a difficult way of life and the land-conquering kind of patriotism that’s a foundation of the American story. I share Lee’s nostalgia. Seventy years later, I am drawn to a similar utopian ideal. ... I’ve had a lifelong obsession with frontier life. I fantasize about locating myself within those pictures and that time. So in an attempt to make the history I wish was real, I have made over Pie Town to mirror my fantasy."[12]