Steve Fitch

Steve Fitch documents the highway sights and out-of-the-way places of the American West in humorous, poetic color and black-and-white photographs. For his first project, published as the book Diesels and Dinosaurs (1976), he captured drive-ins, neon-lit motels, and truck and tourist stops edged along the two-lane highways of the region. “Today, with interstate highways and jet travel, the journey has been diminished,” he has said. “With my photography I have been interested in the ‘vernacular of the journey.’” In other projects, Fitch has focused on abandoned homes and prehistoric Native American pictograph and petroglyph sites in the Great Plains. He cites his undergraduate studies in anthropology as a shaping force in his work, explaining: “In some ways, I have thought of myself as a visual folklorist who uses photography to collect material.”