Debbie Grossman


Debbie Grossman is a Brooklyn-based photographer from Rochester, NY interested in playing with time, re-imagining history, and reviving archival images and documents.

Education

Grossman received an MFA in Photography, Video, and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts, where she won the Paula Rhodes Memorial Prize, and holds a BA in Women's Studies and Art History from Barnard College.

Career

Grossman is a senior editor at Popular Photography magazine, where she is the resident expert on image editing software and technique. Her work is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Jewish Museum, among others. She is represented by the Julie Saul Gallery, New York. In her 2011 show, My Pie Town, Debbie 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.

My Pie Town

My Pie Town first showed at Julie Saul Gallery from April 14 – May 21, 2011. 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. Using Photoshop to modify Lee's pictures, Grossman created an imaginary, parallel world – a "Pie Town" populated and governed exclusively by women.
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. Using sixteen of Lee's unpublished series on Pietown, a homesteaded community in New Mexico, Grossman took male bodies and rendered them to look like masculine women; in others, she shifted the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. The images are revised in subtle ways, making the reading of them very complicated and compelling. 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 propaganda". ..." 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."

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

My Pie Town, Julie Saul Gallery

Group exhibitions

Composed: Identity, Politics, Sex, The Jewish Museum,
The Gender Show, Eastman Museum
After Photoshop : Manipulated Photography in the Digital Age, The Metropolitan Museum 5th Ave
FRAMING DESIRE: Photography and Video, The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth