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Last modified on Wed 18 Jan 2023 18.49 GMT
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Highway 385, Dalhart, Texas, 1974Steve 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
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Highway 81, Waco, Texas, 1973In 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)
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San Fernando Valley, California, 1973In 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’
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Los Angeles, California, 1973Fitch’s serial photographs of the drive-ins, seen together, shape an intriguing typology of a disappearing architectural form
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Highway 80, Dallas, Texas, 1973These 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
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Highway 89, Dallas, Texas, 1973For Fitch, fact is always overwhelmed by fable. Here, the past enters the present not as reality but as a graven image
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Van Nuys, California, 1973In 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’
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Dixie Cruise-in, near Franklin, Ohio, 1974Shapiro 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’
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Melody Drive-in, Springfield, Ohio, 1974Fitch: ‘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’
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Super Skyway Drive-in, Highway I-78, Allentown, Pennsylvania, 1973His pictures were taken on the road from atop a Ford Econoline van with exposures ranging from anywhere between two seconds to a minute
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Drive-in, Checotah, Oklahoma, 1974The essential device that reconciles past and present is light
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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
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