Pie Town Woman

I went to a marvellous exhibit yesterday at the NM Farm & Ranch

Museum in Las Cruces. The exhibit is <b>Pie Town Woman</b>, and it

contains pictures and text from a book of the same name by <a

href="http://www.joanmyers.com/Ptbk.htm">Joan Myers</a>.<br> 

  The show has photographs from three sources. The majority of

images are pictures done of homesteader Doris Caudill and her family

by the FSA photographer Russell Lee in 1940. To these, Myers has

added a collection of family snapshots from the Caudill family, and

also some recently taken large format photos done by Myers in the

area around Pie Town east of Socorro. The result is a unique

pictorial biography of a remarkable woman and her family who were

among the country's last homesteader families.<br>    One

interesting aspect of the book and exhibit for those interested in

documentary photography is that Myers needed no permission to

reproduce the Russell Lee photographs, as pictures done by or for the

government are not protected by copyright. I don't recall reading

any reports of former FSA photographers expressing concern about the

copyright issue and the attendant fact that their art can be used by

anyone for any purpose. In regard to this particular book and

exhibit, it seems unlikely that Lee (now dead) would have had many

reservations given the fact that Myers has really given new life to

his pictures, and perhaps done a better job of portraying Lee's

intent than was done by Stryker in the FSA/OWI days.<br>   

I am particularly interested in the work of Russell Lee because of

his work in New Mexico. He is not among the most well known of the

FSA photographers, but he worked for the organization longer than any

of the others, and I believe he produced about 30,000 photographs

during his tenure there, many of which can be obtained at resonable

cost from the Library of Congress. You can also view the pictures on

line at the LOC site, but the quality of the jpeg images is generally

very poor. Pictures of much better quality can be viewed on line in

the <a

href="http://www.library.swt.edu/swwc/wg/exhibits/rlee/index.asp">The

Russell Lee Collection</a> at the Wittliff Gallery, Texas State

University-San Marcos.<br><br><b>Josie Caudill by Russell Lee</b><br><div></div>

Really cool. That was quite an era for photography. My feeling is that we should be doing things like this all the time, not just during the make-work periods of our history. But I think politicians have come to view cameras as the enemy these days, and given the activities of politicians these days, they are both wrong and right on this account.

 

Those questions about rights are interesting, though I wonder if shooting for the FSA made those photographs "ours", which might explain the nature of their reproduction? Just a conjecture. Library of Congress could (and would) answer this question accurately. I (and my students) have been pleasantly surprised by their receptivity to such things, though it should be a given.

 

Go to Pie Town if you haven't. A town centered around dessert. One restaurant made pies (first one on your left as you go east on the main road through) and then someone got mad and moved 100 yards down the road and opened a second restaurant across the street - more pies. Now everyone has a restaurant they don't go to. I think there might also be a gas station. Pies are great, just don't ask for anything vegetarian as (strangely) it made our waitress burst into tears. Must have been a tough day in Pie Town.

 

Oh and down the road is Quemado which is the jumping off place for a trip to Walter de Maria's Lightning Field - a land art piece made of several hundred metal rods in a plain at 7000' that gets lots of lightning in the summer, plus a historic cabin you can sit in and watch from the porch, just like you mother said not to do.

I haven't made it to Pie Town yet, though it is only a couple hours from where I live in southern NM. I see in my note above that I placed it on the wrong side of Socorro -- it is actually to the west, with the road passing by Magdalena, the Very Large Array, and Datil on the way.<br>    The links I provided to some of the exhibit pictures really don't convey the sense of history that one gets from the book and the exhibit. Lee's old photos beside the modern pictures of the ruined homesteader dugouts really highlight the importance of systematicly recording the life of communities which can disappear with hardly a trace in a few decades.<br>    Here is a <a href="http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsahtml/fares.html">link</a> to the Library of Congress info page on the copyright issue and a suggested credit line for appending to pictures used. The photo archives are a terrific resource for artists and historians, and it seems to me that they might also be used very productively in this forum.