Steve Fitch

Western Landmarks

Two cycles of his work feature in the exhibit: the well-known 1970s series ‘Diesels and Dinosaurs’ and colour photographs from ‘Western Landmarks’, a series created from the 1980s to 1990s.

Steve Fitch first graduated from the University of California at Berkeley (1971) and gained a master’s degree from the University of New Mexico (1978). He has taught photography at UC Berkeley, Colorado State University and Princeton University. Since 1990 Fitch has been a lecturer at the College of Santa Fe. His photographs are held in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Museum of Modern Art in New York, Chicago Art Institute and many others. The photographer has three times been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Fitch is the author of several albums: ‘Diesels and Dinosaurs’ (1976), ‘Marks in Place: Contemporary Responses to Rock Art’ (1988), ‘Gone: Photographs of Abandonment on the High Plains’ (2003), ‘Llano Estacado: Island in the Sky’ (2011) and ‘Motel Signs’ (2011).

After graduation from the anthropology faculty of California University at Berkeley Steve Fitch toured the highways of provincial America. By photographing neon signs outside motels, roadside cafés or quirky roadside attractions like snake pits and dinosaur parks Fitch revives his childhood memories of trips in the family Buick. The photographer refers to this as ‘the vernacular of the journey’. Fitch’s photographic studies capture the spirit of Jack Kerouac’s cult novel ‘On the Road’.

The result of his photo expeditions in the US outback has become a real anthropological study devoted to different phenomena of American culture that have today become symbols of a disappearing epoch.