This weekend, I’m making a trip out to Pie Town, New Mexico, a town with a population of about two hundred that’s named for its famous baked goods. In anticipation, I revisited Russell Lee’s evocative photographs of the town, taken in 1940, while Lee was on assignment for the Farm Security Administration. (Other photographers who produced some of their most iconic work for the F.S.A. include Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Gordon Parks.)
Lee, who had trained as a chemist and then as a painter, arrived in Pie Town in June, 1940, to take pictures _“_of most anything he can find,” as the local Magdalena News put it. He left with six hundred images that give an intimate look at the daily goings on of a small desert community. Unusual for the time, they were mostly shot in color—rich, saturated Kodachrome that shows the landscape in its full vibrancy.
Lee’s Pie Town photographs, along with some 164,000 others taken by F.S.A. photographers, are now held at the Library of Congress.
Photographs by Russell Lee, courtesy Library of Congress.
