During the Depression, photographer Russell Lee made a famous series of color images of Pie Town in remote southwestern New Mexico. Lee was there for the FSA, the Farm Security Administration, documenting homesteaders and their families who had been uprooted by the Dust Bowl. 70 years later, photographer Arthur Drooker retraced Lee's footsteps. The result is Pie Town Revisited, published this month by UNM Press.
Drooker's images of Pie Town reveal that the tiny town's current residents share the same combination of rugged individualism and community spirit that Russell Lee documented in 1940.
In his visits to Pie Town in 2011 and 2012, Arthur Drooker discovered blood relatives of some of the homesteaders Russell Lee photographed 70 years earlier. Drooker describes the pictures he took of them in this longer version of the conversation.
