$45.00 U.S. (trade discount)
No e-book has been authorized.
Hardcover
136 pages with 42 color photographs and 34 black-and-white photographs by the author
12.0″ x 10.5″ landscape/horizontal
ISBN 978-1-960521-11-8
Published in October 2025
Distributed by Casemate/IPM
www.casemateipm.com
No e-book has been authorized. Published in association with the Center for the Study of Place.
Events and Exhibitions
November 8, 2025
Book signing, reception and exhibition
photo-eye, Santa Fe, NM
(read about it in Pasatiempo)
by Steve Fitch
with an introduction by Katherine Ware
An intimate and evocative photographic portrayal of children and childhood in rural Iceland.
Beginning in 1933 and expanding greatly after World War II, mid-century America saw a boom in the construction of large outdoor screen towers on which a projected movie image could be viewed from a parked car. This was the era of the drive-in movie theater, which saw the marriage of the automobile and the Hollywood movie. At its peak during the 1950s and 1960s more than 4,000 drive-in theaters dotted the American landscape, coast to coast.
Starting in 1971, Steve Fitch traveled throughout the United States photographing many of these theaters, concentrating on the often stunning neon and painted murals that decorated the back, street-facing side of the tower that supported the white, rectangular screen. These dramatic murals often depicted scenes that related to the local history of the surrounding community, and they could be seen from many miles away. Working with black-and-white film, he mostly photographed at dusk or night, making striking images that captured the seductive beauty of these roadside monuments.
Then, in 1980, Fitch began working in color with a large-format 8″ x 10″ view camera. Interested in the collecting and comparing possibilities of photography, he began to shift his emphasis to making pictures of the actual white screen itself and the inside spaces of the theater. By the early 1980s, many of the drive-ins were being abandoned or even torn down. The era of the drive-in theater was nearing its end, although today there remain about 300 operating drive-ins in America keeping alive the thrill of watching a movie outdoors, under the stars, in the comfort of one’s car.
About
About the Author
Steve Fitch has been a photographer since the late 1960s and has taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Princeton University, and, most recently, the College of Santa Fe and Santa Fe University of Art and Design. He is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships (1973 and 1975) and the last National Endowment for the Arts Survey Grant, awarded in 1981. He also received the Eliot Porter Fellowship in 1999. He is the author of Diesels and Dinosaurs: Photographs from the American Highway (Long Run Press, 1976), Gone: Photographs of Abandonment on the High Plains, with essays by Merril Gilfillan, Kathleen Howe, and Evelyn Schlatter (University of New Mexico Press, 2002), and Vanishing Vernacular: Western Landmarks (George F. Thompson Publishing, 2018). His work is in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Yale University, among many others. His Website is stevefitch.com.
About the Contributor
Katherine Ware is Curator of Photography at the New Mexico Museum of Art and has served as Curator of Photographs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Assistant Curator at the J. Paul Getty Museum, among other roles. She has organized exhibitions and written about the work of a range of historic and contemporary artists for more than thirty years, including Man Ray: 1890–1976 (Taschen, 2000), Elemental Landscapes: Photographs by Harry Calahan (Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2001), and Earth Now: American Photographers and the Environment (Museum of New Mexico Press, 2011).
Slide Show
Screen towers—drive-in movie theater’s massive outdoor screens and their supporting structures—first piqued the interest of photographer Steve Fitch in 1971 when, freshly out of college, he was traveling and making photographs along American highways. It was the physical presence of the screens themselves that first attracted his eye, as their grand scale and dramatic decorations made each a kind of grand monument on the American landscape. Fitch continued photographing drive-in theaters across the United States for nearly four decades, even as this was the period in which drive-in theaters declined from more than 4,000 in the U.S. during the mid-twentieth century to fewer than 300 today. Fitch captured not only the stark and imposing screen towers looming over their surroundings, but also the wide variety of unique regional designs, decorative murals, and striking neon signs that ornamented the structures. Fitch’s photographs of these iconic American captures these remnants of a bygone age when automobiles and Hollywood films combined to create these uniquely American edifices.
Praise
“Steve Fitch’s latest book, Screen Towers, affords a vivid picture of American drive-in theaters. While fewer than 300 remain, these open-air nighttime retreats grew to become a ubiquitous part of the American landscape during the post-World War II years: entertainment mainstays for families, teenagers, and many others. Fitch’s photographs —some restrained, others exuberant, many haunting—capture a lost world that viewers of many callings will find captivating.”
—Richard Longstreth, Professor Emeritus of American Studies, George Washington University, and author of Road Trip: Roadside America, from Custard’s Last Stand to the Wigwam Restaurant
“The comprehensive panoramas displayed in Steve Fitch’s new book, Screen Towers, encompasses an impressive sequence of his photos of the drive-in theater in America from 1971 to 2009. Whereas his early black-and-white photographs feature the drive-in’s memorable Art Deco designs, his later color photos become increasingly abstract in composition until they approach the art of Rothko’s paintings with their blank white rectangles set against the open landscape and sky. Fitch provides a true catalog of the drive-in theater, a captivating record of creative design from mid-20th-century America.”
—Arthur Krim, author of Route 66: Iconography of the American Highway, winner of the J. B. Jackson Book Prize
“Steve Fitch has always been drawn to America’s highways and the shimmering expressions of the American vernacular he’s found alongside them. At first, he focused on signs and mom-and-pop motels, but eventually the neon led him to drive-ins. When I came upon his photos, I instantly caught a haunted, noir-vibe, but then I started feeling something else: The way Fitch shoots these hulking, human-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. His pictures of the drive-ins aren’t the grandiose LIFE magazine shots of hundreds of cars watching Charlton Heston swallow the screen. They strike me as being the other side of the American fantasy, the less glamorous but more real backstage where the real America lived and worked and went to the movies.”
—Bill Shapiro, former Editor-in-Chief of Life magazine and the founding Editor-in-Chief of LIFE.com, which won the 2011 National Magazine Award for digital photography
My Place
I was bitten by the “back-to-the-land” bug growing up in Mendocino County in northern California during the fifties and sixties. Graduating from UC, Berkeley in 1971, I hoped to some day buy rural property and build my own house on it. When I moved from Berkeley to New Mexico in 1978 to attend graduate school, I believed I was leaving the center of the world and would return to California in two years. Instead, within two weeks of my move to Albuquerque I was thrilled by the landscape and cultures of the Southwest. and never returned to the Bay Area.
In graduate school I met Lynn, my future wife, who was also enamored with the beauty of New Mexico. We were married in 1980 and that summer begin to travel around the state looking for land to buy. In the fall of 1981, while living outside of Boulder, Colorado, a friend mentioned some property that he knew was for sale south of Santa Fe. The next weekend we drove down to check it out. The land was up a bad dirt road, but it was full of character with buttes and canyons, pinyons and junipers. We loved it! I realized that, when looking for rural land, you don’t know what you are looking for until you find it.
We purchased the property and started making plans to build our own mud house there using adobe bricks. Meanwhile, while walking across the land one day with a geologist friend, he casually mentioned how nice it was that we bought land in the Morrison Formation. I was taken aback: If I have a favorite geological formation, it is probably the Morrison. Some of our favorite adventures together had occurred while exploring the landscape of the Morrison: in the Badlands of South Dakota, in Dinosaur National Monument of Colorado, and in the Painted Desert and Petrified Wood National Parks in Arizona. We had not realized that the land we had recently bought was in the Morrison Formation, in particular the Brushy Basin Member of the Morrison.
We eventually built an adobe house, ourselves, over six summers while living the rest of the year in other places. In 1990 when our two sons were six and three, we moved into our newly completed house and have lived in it ever since: off the grid. We find dinosaur bones and gastroliths and prehistoric potsherds when we hike our land. I feed birdseed to the birds and keep an eye out for diamondback rattlesnakes. Our long-gone pets are buried nearby, in a grassy area where I, too, hope to be buried one day and, if luck has it, turned into a fossil.