Steve Fitch calls himself an anthropologist of the American West, and in this small book he trains that habit on a single roadside form: the motel sign. Published by Nazraeli Press as One Picture Book #71, Motel Signs is a hardcover volume of sixteen pages holding eleven four-color plates and one original print. The title appears within a series of compact artist’s books, and its scale is deliberate: not a survey of the West but a concentrated look at one of its recurring artifacts.
Fitch’s interest in these signs is bound up with movement and the built environment. As he describes it, neon figured in the migration along Route 66; the farther west a traveler went, the more neon appeared, especially on hotels, so that a town like Tucumcari, New Mexico, announced itself from twenty miles away. The sign is thus more than decoration. It is an instrument of anticipation, a piece of roadside commerce that also tells a driver how far he has come and what awaits. By turning his assemblage of motels into a running series, Fitch treats the signs as a coherent vernacular form rather than a set of curiosities.
The One Picture Book format gives the work a tight rhythm. Each title in the series is a brief hardcover sequence rather than a comprehensive statement, and the accompanying print links the book to the tradition of the artist’s multiple. Fitch’s photographs are represented in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and The Chicago Art Institute, a context that places this modest volume within a substantial body of exhibited and collected work.
For collectors drawn to the One Picture Book series, or to photographic examinations of the American roadside, the appeal lies in precision rather than scale. Fitch’s anthropological eye is applied to a single subject, and the small format keeps that subject close, letting the signs be read as both practical wayfinding and cultural evidence. It is a contained, deliberate piece of work by a photographer long engaged with how the West pictures itself.
