Steve Fitch’s Plywood Signs, the fiftieth entry in Nazraeli Press’s One Picture Book Two series, takes as its subject the improvised roadside signage of the American West. The volume gathers thirteen four-colour plates within a slim hardcover of sixteen pages, focusing on signs cut from plywood by professionals and self-taught makers alike. Fitch’s interest lies in what happens after the paint goes on: rain, snow, sunlight and wind work against the material, and the grain beneath the surface begins to swell into wavy, swirling patterns. In these patterns he finds an image of what he calls the primeval chaos of the universe, a phrase that suggests the project is less about commerce than about entropy and the marks it leaves.
The book belongs to a long photographic conversation about the vernacular American landscape, and it shares with that tradition an attention to ordinary, overlooked structures. Plywood, cheap and adaptable, makes an unlikely subject. Its amateur handlers give many signs an outsider-art quality, and Fitch treats their efforts without condescension, letting the weathered surface carry as much weight as any message. The result is a study of matter and time rather than a survey of typography or commerce.
As the fiftieth title in the One Picture Book Two series, Plywood Signs is a small, deliberate object: hardcover, six by eight and a half inches, with a compact sequence of colour plates and an original signed photograph included with each copy. The format suits the subject. A short book asks the reader to sit with a handful of images, and the pairing of plate and print connects the reader to the physical photograph in a way that digital viewing cannot.
Fitch’s work is held by institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Amon Carter Museum, the Center for Creative Photography, and the California Museum of Photography. Plywood Signs is his second title with Nazraeli, and its focus on weathering, accident, and the American West gives it a clear place among his concerns. Collectors of the series and of contemporary landscape photography will find here a concise, resonant addition.
