Jim Norris, homesteader, Pie Town, New Mexico

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt pledged a New Deal for Americans through a series of progressive economic and social reforms. One such program, the Farm Security Administration (FSA), relocated unemployed farmers to collective farms and later helped them purchase land. The FSA also employed eleven photographers, including Russell Lee, to document the program’s progress. Lee’s enormous output and early experiments with color were unprecedented in the group. In 1940, he recorded his months-long stay with the residents of Pie Town, New Mexico, many of whom had migrated from Oklahoma and Texas during the Depression. (Sept. 2016)