Steve Fitch
American, born 1949
After graduating from the University of California at Berkeley in 1971 with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology, and while teaching photography at the ASUC School on the Berkeley campus, I began work on a project photographing the vernacular roadside of the American highway. I received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships to aid in the completion of this project, first in 1973 and the second in 1975. Eventually, the photographs were published in the monograph, "Diesels and Dinosaurs" in 1976.
After receiving a master’s degree in fine arts from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque in 1978, I accepted a teaching position at the University of Colorado in Boulder. In 1981, as a member of the "Marks and Measures" project, I began photographing prehistoric Native American pictograph and petroglyph sites in the American west. This project was partly funded by the last National Endowment of the Arts Survey Grant awared in 1981. My work on the project, along with that of the other four project members, was published in a monograph, "Marks in Place: Contemporary Responses to Rock Art, by the University of New Mexico Press in 1988. I received several purchase awards in various exhibitions for the photographs made during this period.
Partly as a result of the work I did for "Diesels and Dinosaurs," I became interested in the artistic possibilities of neon and learned to fabricate my own neon pieces in 1981. I have made a number of neon installations over the past thirty years, several of which are permanently located in outdoor locations in New Mexico.
In 1990, after teaching a Princeton University for four years in the Visual Arts Program, I returned to New Mexico and began photographing the ongoing abandonment of the high Great Plains receiving the Eliot Porter Fellowship from the New Mexico Council for Photography in 1999 to aid in the completion of this project. In 2003 a book of these photographs entitled "Gone: Photographs of Abandonment on the High Plains" was published by the University of New Mexico Press and a traveling exhibition of the photographs was organized by University of New Mexico Art Museum. The entire exhibition of forty photographs was purchased by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. From 1990 through 2013, I taught photography at the College of Santa Fe.
Steve Fitch (American, b. 1949) fell in love with the attractions of the American highway during family road trips and after college began photographing them to create his first body of work. Along with an eye for good composition, his training as an anthropologist contributed to this series, which was shot with black-and-white film that lends a gritty, nostalgic air to the images. He quickly adopted color film to capture the distinctive aura and colors of neon motel signs at night. “To me, neon really figured in the migration movement on Route 66,” Fitch said on the release of his book Motel Signs (Nazraeli Press, 2011). “The farther you go out West, the more neon you’d see, especially as a presence on motels. You can see towns like Tucumcari, New Mexico, coming from twenty miles away.” Over the years, he has revisited the sites of his early photographs and rephotographed the survivors. His fascination with material culture and social change subsequently led to bodies of work on prehistoric Native American pictograph and petroglyph sites in the American west, abandoned buildings of the High Plains region, and the structures and radio towers of the Llano Estacado region of western Texas and eastern New Mexico.
Today, my wife and I live off the grid in a passive solar adobe house we constructed ourselves over six summers, beginning in 1984, on rural land in Santa Fe County, New Mexico. We use photovoltaic panels to meet all of our electricity needs and collect water in an extensive rainwater gathering system. Recently, I finished a project photographing in the Llano Estacado region of western Texas and eastern New Mexico. My work on the project, as well as that of five other photographers, was partly funded by a grant from the Southwest Collection at Texas Tech University and was published by Texas Tech University Press in 2011 and will be published in an upcoming monograph by Texas Tech University Press.
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