Steve Fitch | American, 1949 -
After graduating from the University of California at Berkeley in 1971 with a bachelors degree in anthropology, and while teaching photography at the ASUC Studio on the Berkeley campus, Fitch began work on a project photographing the vernacular roadside of the American highway. He received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships to aid in the completion of this project, one in 1973 and the second in 1975. Eventually, the photographs were published in the monograph, Diesels and Dinosaurs, in 1976.
After receiving a masters degree in fine arts from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque in 1978, Fitch accepted a teaching position at the University of Colorado in Boulder. In 1981, as a member of the "Marks and Measures" project, he began photographing prehistoric Native American pictograph and petroglyph sites in the American west. This project was partly funded by the last National Endowment for the Arts Survey Grant awarded in 1981. His 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.
In 1990, after teaching at Princeton University for four years in the Visual Arts Program, Fitch 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.
Steve Fitch's work in in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Modern Art, New York, J. Paul Gety Museum, Amon Carter Museum, Center for Creative Photography, California Museum of Photography; among others.
Recently, Motel Signs was published as part of Nazraeli Press' One Picture Book Series.