Vanishing Vernacular: Western Landmarks collects Steve Fitch’s important photographic record of iconic imagery in the western United States: hotel neon, drive-in movie theaters, even ancient petroglyphs.
I’ve long been a fan of his work and have been eagerly anticipating this collection. Via the publisher:
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.”
