$45.00 U.S. (trade discount)
No e-book has been authorized.
Hardcover
172 pages with 130 photographs by the author, including 2 gatefolds and 127 in color and 3 in
black-and-white
10.0″ x 11.875″
ISBN 978-1-938086-60-1
Published in April 2018
Distributed by Casemate/IPM
www.casemateipm.com
No e-book has been authorized.
Events and Exhibitions
Opening & Artist Reception:
Friday, March 30, 2018
Book Signing: Saturday, May 12
On View: March 30 – May 19
Vanishing Vernacular, photo-eye Gallery, Santa Fe, NM
Read an interview with Steve Fitch from the photo-eye gallery.
by Steve Fitch
Concluding essay by Toby Jurovics
Finalist for the 2018 NM & AZ Book Awards best photo/art book of the year!
Steve Fitch is among America’s most well-known chroniclers of the American West who has been photographing the West’s changing vernacular landscape and its vanishing roadside landmarks for more than 45 years. In his new book, Fitch presents both the ancient and modern West by way of photographing petroglyphs, neon motel signs, hand-painted business signs, drive-in movie theaters, and radio towers—all vanishing landmarks. They are now endangered because of the advent of the Interstate Highway System and its corporate franchises that have eclipsed travel and small businesses along historic U.S. highways such as Route 66.
In this fascinating and comprehensive account, we join in Fitch’s expansive journey, beginning in the 1970s and the days of Easy Rider and ending in the present age. His quest is truly an odyssey of epic proportions and the book’s 130 unforgettable photographs are deliberately sequenced to mimic the experience of the open road—during both day and night. Fitch explains how he developed the project in his informative introduction, in which, interestingly, he suggests that the petroglyphs of the ancient Pueblo people have endured far better and longer than anything made during the last sixty years. Curator Toby Jurovics, in his insightful concluding essay, reveals Fitch’s own view of photography as a visual form of cultural anthropology and positions Fitch’s work in relation to that of Robert Adams, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, Stephen Shore, and other practitioners of the photographic style known as the “New Topographics.”
Vanishing Vernacular: Western Landmarks is sure to become a modern-day classic, a book that will be all the more revered as America and Americans move farther away from the U.S. highways of the past. That historic roadside economy and its vernacular culture and architecture are vanishing like endangered species, but, thankfully, Steve Fitch was along for the long ride. In sharing that past, he has created his own kind of preservation by saving the West’s iconic landmarks of the open road through his photography.
WATCH
As part of photo l.a.’s Virtual Connect + Collect, we hosted a live conversation between gallery artist Steve Fitch and photo-eye’s Gallery director Anne Kelly. They discussed both his creative process and the history behind his extraordinary body of work. 7/2020
About
About the Author
Steve Fitch has been a photographer since the early 1970s. He has taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Princeton University, and, most recently, at the College of Santa Fe and the Santa Fe University of Art and Design. He is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in 1973 and 1975, the last National Endowment for the Arts Survey Grant, awarded in 1981, and the Eliot Porter Fellowship in 1999. He is also the author of Diesels & Dinosaurs: Photographs from the American Highway (Long Run Press 1976), and Gone: Photographs of Abandonment on the High Plains, with essays by Merrill Gilfillan, Kathleen Howe, and Evelyn Schlatter with essays by Merrill Gilfillan, Kathleen Howe, and Evelyn Schlatter (University of New Mexico Press 2002). His work is in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Yale University Art Gallery, among others.
About the Contributor
Toby Jurovics is Chief Curator and Richard and Mary Holland Curator of American Western Art at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska. Previously, he was Curator of Photography at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Associate Curator of Photography at the Princeton University Art Museum. He has organized exhibitions on Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Barbara Bosworth, Emmet Gowin, A. J. Russell, William Sutton, and William Wylie, among many other artists, and has written seminal essays on Thomas Joshua Cooper, John Gossage, and the New Topographics. He is the author of Framing the West: The Survey Photographs of Timothy H. O’Sullivan (Yale University Press, 2010).
Slide Show
January 10, 1983. Prehistoric Native American petroglyphs and pictographs, unlike the subjects in most of the photographs in this book, are not usually found along roads but in the open landscape or along trails. They are most often on south-facing rocks or cliff walls, many times at locations with views or at the junction of two rivers. This petroglyph, probably more than 1,000 years old, has been described as a “jaguar with a rattlesnake tail” on an information kiosk at the Three Rivers petroglyph site in Lincoln County, New Mexico. It commands a view of the Oscura Mountains and, beyond them, the Jornada del Muerto and Trinity Site, where the world’s first nuclear explosion occurred on July 16, 1945. 
June 18, 1983. Contemporary U.S. 163 with two highway artifacts from previous versions of the highway. This view looks west toward Mexican Hat, Utah, which is a few miles away. When I revisited this spot in 2013, the two older highway fragments had completely disappeared with no traces visible. They were, literally, “marks on the land,” unintentional earth works, that proved to be ephemeral. 
July 12, 1982. Las Vegas, New Mexico, is famously located where the Great Plains run up against the Rocky Mountains. The Fort Union Drive-in Movie Theater is located on the eastern edge of town near the old Santa Fe Trail, and this view looks east, past the big, white rectangle toward the High Plains prairie. The Fort Union is one of two active drive-in movie theaters left in the state of New Mexico and was still open when I went through in the summer of 2016. 
July 21, 2007. This photograph contains another double landscape on a sign along U.S. 491 on the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation south of Cortez, Colorado, a magical landscape painted in silhouette with Ute Mountain floating in the sky above teepees. The problem with plywood signs outdoors is that they don’t weather well. But, as a result, they become more interesting as they age, acquiring character and a history. What does last? Unique motel signs made of neon and metal don’t either. Drive-in movie theaters don’t. Prehistoric Native American petroglyphs hand pecked into stone with simple tools, however, have done pretty well, especially in the dry Southwest. Many are several thousand years old. 
July 19. 2007. The North Fork Motel is on U.S. 93 in the town of North Fork, Idaho, next to the North Fork of the Salmon River. Lewis and Clark passed this spot on their way west in 1805, after crossing Lemhi Pass and before going over the Lost Trail Pass about thirty miles to the north. This is a 1940s style, pre-franchise sign with a name and design that relate to the local area in Idaho. 
May 22, 1981. The AA “MODERN” Motel with “CAMPING” sits next to railroad tracks and U.S. 6 in Holdrege, Nebraska, which is located slightly east of the 100th meridian in central Nebraska, the line of demarcation for the West. The problem with using “modern” on a sign is that it is hard for the motel to keep up with the word. When I made this photograph I was on my way to Antigo, Wisconsin, to learn to bend neon. 
December 31, 1980. It seems obvious that these two motel signs, for The Bel Air Motel and Bel Shore Motel, on the same stretch of U.S. 70 in Deming, New Mexico, were constructed by the same sign shop, which crammed word information in a stacked form onto a sign. Although Deming has been bypassed by Interstate 10, these motels survived into the early 1980s. 
July 1990. The Blue Swallow Motel is located on U.S. 66 (aka Route 66) and survives in another one of my gateway towns, Tucumcari. It is the classic sign and motel by which all other Route 66 motels, from Chicago to Los Angeles, should be, and are, compared. Lillian Redman, the owner of the Blue Swallow who was in her 80s when I made this photograph, turned the motel’s office into a veritable museum of things Blue Swallow and Route 66. Her husband once made a painting of a blue swallow that was used as the template for the neon swallow; the painting is prominently displayed in the motel’s office. Lillian has died, but the Blue Swallow lives on in all of its glory, with a new series of owners who have taken pride in and maintained the sign and motel. 
December 18, 1980. The Grand View Motel is on the very north end of Raton, New Mexico,on U.S. 87; the Capri Motel is nearby. Both motels are close to the old Santa Fe Trail on the southern side of Raton Pass. The star above the Capri is on Goat Hill, which is lit up around Christmas, is surrounded on three sides by the town of Raton. 
January 8, 1981. This lonesome, now-abandoned motel in the panhandle of Texas is about forty miles west of the Oklahoma border in Hedley, Texas, along U.S. 287. When I first passed by in 1980,it had no name or, at least, no sign to identify it. When I saw it again in September 2015, it appeared to have been closed for many years, still standing with the fragile neon tubes under the eaves intact but probably unlit for decades. I often revisit and sometimes photograph places that I have seen before, as a way of connecting two different times through one place. 
November 3, 1985. The Bordertown Drive-in Theater pictured at right, was on U.S. 59 in Laredo, Texas, a few miles from the Mexican border. It had a mural very similar to that of the Bordertown Drive-in Theater, which was on U.S. 62 and 180, a few miles from the Mexican border in El Paso, Texas. Laredo Air Force Base was nearby and Fort Bliss was near the Bordertown in El Paso, which might explain the twin jets bracketing the bull. 
January 9, 1981. The screen side of the Prairie Drive-in Theater along U.S. 287 in Dumas, Texas, has a three-dimensional white rectangle. 
January 2, 1981. A row of metal chairs for a close-up view of a drive-in theater screen on U.S. 90 on the southern side of Van Horn in West Texas. 
September 9, 2006. This radio tower is located on New Mexico 104 in eastern New Mexico between Trujillo and Las Vegas. 
March 15, 2009. This radio tower sits on the outskirts of Tulia, Texas.
Praise
“The American West has changed immeasurably over the past half a century. In Steve Fitch’s wonderful photographic survey Vanishing Vernacular: Western Landmarks we find a fading world of the hotels, diners, radio masts and cinemas dotted along the highways. In a similar vein to the city vistas of Eugène Atget and Berenice Abbot and – in particular – the studies of cooling towers by Bernd and Hiller Becher, Fitch produces a moving paean to the landmarks of yesteryear.”
—Christian House, freelance arts and books writer for the Guardian and the Daily Telegraph (read the full article here)
“Steve Fitch reminds us of one of the great pleasures of the classic American road trip, the exuberant roadside motel sign, an endangered species he artfully captures in all its neon glory, alongside drive-in movie theaters, hand-painted signs, and other oddities of the Western cultural landscape.”
—Katherine Ware, Curator of Photography, New Mexico Museum of Art
“Steve Fitch, who refers to himself as a visual folklorist, has documented the changing landscape of the American West since the mid-1970s. His new photo book, Vanishing Vernacular: Western Landmarks, is a striking visual commentary on how these once ubiquitous signs—alongside thousand-year-old petroglyphs, small-town murals, and drive-in theaters—are becoming part of the collective memory of the West.”
—Aida Amer, Atlas Obscura (read the full article here)
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.