Vanishing Vernacular: Western Landmarks

Vanishing Vernacular: Western Landmarks

Finalist 2018 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards â€“ Arts Books

Steve Fitch is among Americaâ€™s most well-known chroniclers of the American West since the days of Easy Rider. He has been photographing examples of the Westâ€™s changing vernacular landscape and vanishing roadside landmarks for more than 40 years. In his new book, he presents both the ancient and the modern by way of petroglyphs, neon motel signs and hand-painted business signs, drive-in movie theater screens, and radio and cell towers. All of them are now endangered because of the advent of the Interstate Highway System and corporate franchises.

In this fascinating and comprehensive account, we are able to join in Fitchâ€™s expansive journey, truly an odyssey, as represented in the bookâ€™s 120 unforgettable photographs, all sequenced to mimic the open roadâ€”both during day and night. Fitch explains 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, positions Fitchâ€™s work in relation to that of the practitioners of the photographic style known as the â€œNew Topographicsâ€ and Fitchâ€™s own view of photography as a visual form of cultural anthropology.

Vanishing Vernacular: Western Landmarks is sure to become a modern-day classic, a book that will be all the more revered as America and Americans move farther away from the highways of the past. That economy and roadside culture are vanishing like endangered species, but Fitch was along for the ride. In sharing that past, he has been witness to his own form of historic preservation.

Country	USA
Brand	George F Thompson Publishing
Manufacturer	George F Thompson Publishing
Binding	Hardcover
ItemPartNumber	119 color photographs and 11 color illus
ReleaseDate	2018-04-10
UnitCount	1
EANs	9781938086601

Vanishing Vernacular: Western Landmarks

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