Highway 385, Dalhart, Texas, 1974
Steve Fitch has actually been photographing the American west for years, exposing its altering landscape and disappearing roadside tourist attractions. Steve Fitch’s Drive-In Theaters is at Joseph Bellows Gallery, California till 4 March
Highway 81, Waco, Texas, 1973
In 1971 Fitch started deal with a job photographing the vernacular roadside of the American highway and released the well-known essay, Diesels and Dinosaurs (Long Run Press, 1976)
San Fernando Valley, California, 1973
In Diesel and Dinosaurs, for an essay entitled American Photography: A Critical History 1945 to today, Jonathan Green composed: ‘In Steve Fitch’s Diesels and Dinosaurs, the mythic existence of the Old West is found in today’s popular roadside culture. Fitch photographs the diesel trucks, roadside amusements, motels and hand-drawn indications of the American highway. His work mirrors that paradoxical American duality: a fascination with the effective maker and a respect for wildness’
Los Angeles, California, 1973
Fitch’s serial pictures of the drive-ins, seen together, form an appealing typology of a vanishing architectural type
Highway 80, Dallas, Texas, 1973
These cinematic landmarks are now primarily artefacts of a moving cultural landscape; they are, nevertheless, completely protected in Fitch’s remarkable photos, which mainly envision their subject under the fluorescent radiance of the drive-in signs
Highway 89, Dallas, Texas, 1973
For Fitch, reality is constantly overwhelmed by myth. Here, the previous gets in today not as truth however as a graven image
Van Nuys, California, 1973
In a current interview with author Bill Shapiro, Fitch states: ‘There’s something about setting up this huge rectangular shape in the landscape, this frame, and predicting American suitables, impressions, and dreams on it’
Dixie Cruise-in, near Franklin, Ohio, 1974
Shapiro includes: ‘I immediately captured a haunted, noir-vibe. Then I began feeling something else: the method Steve shoots these hulking, manufactured landscapes– both the angle and the subtle, strange essence of the night light– practically makes them feel like holy locations, which maybe they are’
Tune Drive-in, Springfield, Ohio, 1974
Fitch: ‘I ended up being actually conscious this time of day, to sunset, midway in between day and night, a time in between 2 worlds. There was a state of mind to the quality of the light, a psychological energy’
Super Skyway Drive-in, Highway I-78, Allentown, Pennsylvania, 1973
His images were handled the roadway from atop a Ford Econoline van with direct exposures varying from anywhere in between 2 seconds to a minute
Drive-in, Checotah, Oklahoma, 1974
The important gadget that fixes up previous and present is light
Cactus Drive-in, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1974
By photographing at sunset and after sunset, Fitch makes the most banal indications appear huge and glowing