Highway 385, Dalhart, Texas, 1974
Steve Fitch has been photographing the American west for decades, revealing its changing landscape and vanishing roadside attractions. Steve Fitch’s Drive-In Theaters is at Joseph Bellows Gallery, California until 4 March
Highway 81, Waco, Texas, 1973
In 1971 Fitch began work on a project photographing the vernacular roadside of the American highway and published the acclaimed monograph, 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 the Present, Jonathan Green wrote: ‘In Steve Fitch’s Diesels and Dinosaurs, the mythic presence of the Old West is discovered in today’s popular roadside culture. Fitch photographs the diesel trucks, roadside amusements, motels and hand-drawn signs of the American highway. His work mirrors that paradoxical American duality: a fascination with the efficient machine and a reverence for wildness’
Los Angeles, California, 1973
Fitch’s serial photographs of the drive-ins, seen together, shape an intriguing typology of a disappearing architectural form
Highway 80, Dallas, Texas, 1973
These cinematic landmarks are now mostly artefacts of a shifting cultural landscape; they are, however, perfectly preserved in Fitch’s extraordinary photographs, which mostly picture their subject under the fluorescent glow of the drive-in signage
Highway 89, Dallas, Texas, 1973
For Fitch, fact is always overwhelmed by fable. Here, the past enters the present not as reality but as a graven image
Van Nuys, California, 1973
In a recent interview with writer Bill Shapiro, Fitch says: ‘There’s something about putting up this big rectangle in the landscape, this frame, and projecting American ideals, illusions, and fantasies on it’
Dixie Cruise-in, near Franklin, Ohio, 1974
Shapiro adds: ‘I instantly caught a haunted, noir-vibe. But then I started feeling something else: the way Steve shoots these hulking, man-made landscapes – both the angle and the subtle, mysterious essence of the evening light – almost makes them feel like holy places, which perhaps they are’
Melody Drive-in, Springfield, Ohio, 1974
Fitch: ‘I became really sensitive to this time of day, to dusk, halfway between day and night, a time between two worlds. There was a mood to the quality of the light, an emotional energy’
Super Skyway Drive-in, Highway I-78, Allentown, Pennsylvania, 1973
His pictures were taken on the road from atop a Ford Econoline van with exposures ranging from anywhere between two seconds to a minute
Drive-in, Checotah, Oklahoma, 1974
The essential device that reconciles past and present is light
Cactus Drive-in, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1974
By photographing at dusk and after dusk, Fitch makes even the most banal signs seem monumental and radiant
