Thursday, 6/5/97 Photographer captures bygone images of American
Southwest Fitch documents abandoned frontier ruins, saves memories
of an era
By Vanessa VanderZanden Daily Bruin Staff Somewhere, between
tired truck stops and abandoned Southwestern shacks, a spirit
breathes across America. It burns through neon signs and overpriced
roadside attractions. It even steals through the shutter of
photographer Steve Fitch’s camera lens. "As a kid, going on road
trips with my family, I can remember that the drive was half the
experience," a soft spoken Fitch says. "It had a more
individualistic feel to it with quirky structures popping up along
the way. Now there are too many Day’s Inns. My work is a kind of
child’s view of the highway." These photographs, taken from 1971 to
1976 and published in his book, "Diesels and Dinosaurs," share the
walls of the Paul Kopeikin Gallery with some of his more recent
works. All relate to Fitch’s vision of the idea of journey, the
show "Diesels, Dinosaurs, and Beyond," on view through July 5,
represents an America which only partly survives today. "I
graduated from UC Berkeley in ’71 and hit the road with a Ford
Conway van," Fitch remembers with more than a touch of nostalgia.
"I was tired of writing papers for classes and wanted something
that felt more real. Also, I just wanted to explore the country."
So, with a degree in anthropology and a minor in chemistry, Fitch
took off for an adventure that would determine his life’s course.
His job at a student darkroom allowed him to take weeks off at a
time, enabling him to follow his asphalt dream. Using his newfound
views from anthropology, the ability to alter photographic images
chemically with his scientific know-how, and the photographic
basics picked up in junior high from his father and a neighbor,
Fitch began his artistic voyage. "At first, I just took daytime
pictures, but then I realized it wasn’t representational of the
whole experience I was having," he recalls. "In my sense of
discovery, the experience of being on the road was at night. I
mean, half our time is spent during the night. Even now I work at
night." His first representation of evening activity shows a motel
on highway 85 in Deadwood, South Dakota. Taken in ’72, the shot
includes the building’s neon sign flashing from atop the corner of
the wood-framed office. A neon clock boldly reveals the time, while
the soft outline of trees is barely visible on the horizon. "I
wasn’t aware of people photographing at night, so I played around
with different exposures on my own," Fitch explains. "I love how
the neon clock shows the precise second I took the picture. Photos
show instances of time." Many of the moments picked up on Fitch’s
lens represent a world which no longer exists. A motel where every
room comes in the shape of a wigwam, a reptile ranch advertising
all kinds of peculiar snakes and a giant sculpture of a dinosaur
sitting roadside probably aren’t the normal fare for highway
wanderers today. In keeping with this nostalgic mood, Fitch has
more recently begun photographing the abandoned buildings of the
Southwestern plains. "They’re like the Mayan ruins, only they’re
the ruins of my generation," Fitch comments. "At one point in time,
the people left. They just walked out. There will be stuff like a
roof falling in but then a lady’s delicate dress will be hanging in
the closet." One such photo, taken just last year in Modoc, Kansas,
shows cracked aqua-marine walls running into a dirt-covered floor.
A fading box with the title, "The Space Shuttle" on it sits on a
chair, waiting eerily for a ghost child to come play. On the stove
to its left, large cans of "Pure Shortening" rest inside a "Fruit a
Plenty" crate, as though expecting a phantom housewife to begin
baking. "We don’t preserve these places, but they really show us
what the people were doing, right down to the kid’s space shuttle
toy," Fitch says. "They reveal this wave of occupation in the
plains. We keep erasing one layer of time and putting another on
top. Photography preserves these layers." Fitch has caught these
layers of deterioration in the airplane-patterned paper covering
the wall of one such shack. Beginning in ’91, he photographed the
blue and orange airplanes flying through the white sky of brown
water-stained wall paper every time he drove through the area. Last
time he went, the building had fallen down. "It went from where it
was standing to total deterioration really quick," Fitch sadly
relates. "I feel I have a mission to photographically record these
places. In living our lives, we tend not to notice the rate of
change." Likewise, while the plains once seemed an area promising
future prosperity, the population has dropped drastically in recent
years. 130 counties in the area currently maintain the standards of
frontier times with less than two people per square mile. In an
effort to represent this economically dwindling region and reflect
the correlation which photography has to time, Fitch often uses
long exposures of 10 to 20 minutes. "There’s something almost
quasi-mystical about standing inside a 10-minute exposure," Fitch
dreamily relates. "We think of photographs as being just a few
seconds. This technique creates a weird look, like in this one
where the door was blowing in and out the whole time." While the
door appears closed in the picture, a surreal outline just barely
glows around it to produce a jarring image. Similarly, another shot
of a decrepit dance hall reveals bullet holes in the door which
allow light to bleed in, due to the extended exposure. Light plays
a big part in Fitch’s work; he’s even able to capture this feeling
through a series of pictures focusing on tall bushes outside of
suburban homes. "I’m after a mood, an apocalyptic weirdness to the
light," Fitch explains. "In these scenes, there’s a threat of
nuclear war which my two kids today really don’t have to deal with.
Even in the highway pieces, light means something. The neon signs
functioned as landmarks becoming a symbol of energy of our
country." Taking this realization to new bounds, Fitch currently
bends neon to create commercial signs part-time. He also teaches
photography at a college in Santa Fe, showing his own work in
galleries and books on the side. And though America no longer makes
room for apple pie at 35 cents a slice, the Paul Kopeikin Gallery
offers a space for Fitch to represent these images of an era gone
by. ART: "Diesels, Dinosaurs, and Beyond" runs through July 5 at
the Paul Kopeikin Gallery, located at 138 North La Brea. For more
info, call (213) 937- 0765.