Steve Fitch’s Screen Towers: The Drive-In Theater in America takes as its subject a structure designed to be both monumental and temporary: the outdoor cinema screen rising above parking lots, roads, and open land. The cover’s “Star Vu” tower, surrounded by film titles and traffic signs, identifies the book’s central concern—the point at which entertainment architecture enters the everyday American landscape.

The project has deep roots. The publisher situates its beginnings in 1971, when Fitch, newly out of college, was traveling; one documented photograph depicts the Star Vu Drive-In Theater in Longmont, Colorado, in 1980. Such details place the work within an extended photographic engagement rather than a retrospective survey assembled at a distance. The resulting panoramas approach drive-ins not simply as venues but as spatial arrangements of screen, signage, roadway, and horizon.

That emphasis gives the photographs value beyond nostalgia. Drive-in theaters combined cinema, automobile culture, vernacular design, and expansive land use in a form particular to twentieth-century America. By concentrating on their screen towers, Fitch isolates the element that made these sites visible from afar: a blank architectural plane that could become an image after dark. In daylight, however, it returns to being an object in the landscape, and this shift between spectacle and structure provides the book with its distinctive conceptual tension.

Published in 2025 by George F. Thompson Publishing, the English-language hardcover comprises 136 pages; Katherine Ware contributes the introduction. For collectors concerned with American landscape photography, roadside architecture, or the photographic study of vernacular forms, its importance rests in the sustained definition of a precise subject. Screen Towers brings together an artist’s long attention to drive-in architecture in a substantial single volume, allowing individual theaters to be considered as variations within a broader cultural type.