Molayem ART Magazine International Art Magazine
At the drive-in: 1970s roadside movies – in pictures
Steve Fitch’s black and white images of drive-in theatres tell a story of the American landscape – and religion too
-
Highway 385, Dalhart, Texas, 1974
Steve Fitch has been photographing the American west for decades, revealing its changing landscape and vanishing roadside attractions. Steve Fitch’s Drive-In Theaters is at Joseph Bellows Gallery, California until 4 March
-
Highway 81, Waco, Texas, 1973
In 1971 Fitch began work on a project photographing the vernacular roadside of the American highway and published the acclaimed monograph, Diesels and Dinosaurs (Long Run Press, 1976)
-
San Fernando Valley, California, 1973
In Diesel and Dinosaurs, for an essay entitled American Photography: A Critical History 1945 to the Present, Jonathan Green wrote: ‘In Steve Fitch’s Diesels and Dinosaurs, the mythic presence of the Old West is discovered in today’s popular roadside culture. Fitch photographs the diesel trucks, roadside amusements, motels and hand-drawn signs of the American highway. His work mirrors that paradoxical American duality: a fascination with the efficient machine and a reverence for wildness’
-
Los Angeles, California, 1973
Fitch’s serial photographs of the drive-ins, seen together, shape an intriguing typology of a disappearing architectural form
-
Highway 80, Dallas, Texas, 1973
These cinematic landmarks are now mostly artefacts of a shifting cultural landscape; they are, however, perfectly preserved in Fitch’s extraordinary photographs, which mostly picture their subject under the fluorescent glow of the drive-in signage
-
Highway 89, Dallas, Texas, 1973
For Fitch, fact is always overwhelmed by fable. Here, the past enters the present not as reality but as a graven image
-
Van Nuys, California, 1973
In a recent interview with writer Bill Shapiro, Fitch says: ‘There’s something about putting up this big rectangle in the landscape, this frame, and projecting American ideals, illusions, and fantasies on it’
-
Dixie Cruise-in, near Franklin, Ohio, 1974
Shapiro adds: ‘I instantly caught a haunted, noir-vibe. But then I started feeling something else: the way Steve shoots these hulking, man-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’
-
-
