Steve Fitch

Joseph Bellows Gallery is pleased to present Steve Fitch: American Motel Signs, from May 21 thru August 31. This solo exhibition will showcase a selection of color photographs from the artist’s roadside survey of the signage that adorns these traditional, mid-century mom-and-pop lodgings.

Lit by neon and designed with flair, they came to be known as “motels,” a name coined by the owner of the Milestone Mo-Tel (an abbreviation of “motor hotel”) in San Luis Obispo, California, the world’s first motel, which opened in 1925. In their heyday, motels were ubiquitous along American highways and byways, numbering over 60,000 by 1964.

Unfortunately, “today’s road-tripper generally prefers lodging that boasts a professional website, guarantees a fast internet connection and promises easy-on-easy-off interstate access, leaving the older motels built along two-lane roads and numbered highways to go to seed.” [1] Fitch’s images are not only a typology of motel signs, but an anthropological study of the American West.

In his survey, Fitch centers his lens on the sculptural elements, unique design, and typography of each individual sign, addressing these visual components by stating: “What does matter is the idea of theme and variation, how a collection can be interesting because of the variety of specimens. A collection of butterflies illustrates this idea, for example, and photography is such a great medium for collecting and comparing, which is what my motel sign project is ultimately all about.”

Printed by the artist in two sizes, 12 x 12 and 15 x 15 inches, the array of color and detail in these photographs defines both the sign and the atmosphere of the surrounding landscape, offering the viewer a remarkable study of these roadside markers.

Steve Fitch (American, 1949- ), earned an MFA from the University New Mexico in 1978 and has taught photography at UC Berkeley, the University of Colorado in Boulder, Princeton University, and since 1990, at the College of Santa Fe. For more than forty years he has been photographing the American West, revealing its changing vernacular landscape, and vanishing roadside attractions. His work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; J. Paul Getty Museum; Amon Carter Museum, Center for Creative Photography, and the California Museum of Photography, among others.

Monographs include Diesels and Dinosaurs (Long Run Press, 1976); Gone: Photographs of Abandonment on the High Plains (University of New Mexico Press, 2002); Motel Signs (Nazraeli Press, 2018); American Motels Signs (The Velvet Cell, 2016); Vanishing Vernacular: Western Landmarks (George F. Thompson, 2018); American Motels Signs II (The Velvet Cell, 2020); and American Motels Signs III (The Velvet Cell, 2022).

[1] The Rise and Fall of the Great American Motel, Andrew Wood, The Conversation, 2017

American Motel Signs

May 21 – August 31, 2024

Press Release