Fitch taught at the
University of Colorado in Boulder as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Fine Arts from 1979 until 1985. He was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the
University of San Antonio in 1985 and a Lecturer in the Visual Arts Program at
Princeton University from 1986 to 1990. At the
Santa Fe University of Art and Design, he was a Professor of Photography in the art department from 1990 until 2013.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
The J. Paul Getty Museum, the
Whitney Museum of American Art, the
Museum of Modern Art, the
Art Institute of Chicago; the
Rijksmuseum, and the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow. In 1990 he began photographing the haunted interiors of abandoned buildings on the high Great Plains. Fitch worked on a photography project capturing the vernacular roadside of the American highway. He received two
National Endowment of the Arts Fellowships, in 1973 and 1975 to help in the completion of the project. In 1981, he began work on another project for which he captured prehistoric Native American
pictograph and
petroglyph sites in the American West and a project that was partially funded by a National Endowment for the Arts Survey Grant. When he returned to New Mexico in 1990, he photographed the ongoing abandonment of the high Great Plains and also received the
Eliot Porter Fellowship from the New Mexico Council for Photography in 1999 to aid in the completion of this project.
Work Fitch's first project of black and white photographs was published as
Diesels and Dinosaurs (1976), in which he photographed neon-lit motels and signs, truckstops and tourist spots along the highway, drive-in movie theaters mostly in the West of America, and billboards and plywood signs. In a later project, he focused on the prehistoric Native American pictograph and petroglyph sites in the Southwest and then–using an 8"x10" view camera–the abandoned homes and schools on the high Great Plains west of the 100th Meridian. Fitch's
Vanishing Vernacular series is a selection of his work, in color, which mainly focuses on features of the western roadside landscape. Christian House, a freelance arts and books writer for the
Guardian and the Daily Telegraph wrote that "The American West has changed immeasurably over the past half a century. In Steve Fitch's wonderful photographic survey Vanishing Vernacular: Western Landmarks we find a fading world of the hotels, diners, radio masts and cinemas dotted along the highways. In a similar vein to the city vistas of
Eugène Atget and Berenice Abbot and – in particular – the studies of cooling towers by Bernd and Hiller Becher, Fitch produces a moving paean to the landmarks of yesteryear." According to Aida Amer at
Atlas Obscura, "Steve Fitch, who refers to himself as a visual folklorist, has documented the changing landscape of the American West since the mid-1970s. His new photo book, Vanishing Vernacular: Western Landmarks, is a striking visual commentary on how these once ubiquitous signs—alongside thousand-year-old petroglyphs, small-town murals, and drive-in theaters—are becoming part of the collective memory of the West." In a series
American Motel Signs, Fitch took photos of advertisements and colorful signage across the United States.
American Motel Signs II is the sequel to the 2016 book. In a project called
Marks and Measures, he worked with four other photographers taking pictures of prehistoric Native American pictograph and petroglyph sites which resulted in the book
Marks in Place: Contemporary Responses to Rock Art (1988) published by the
University of New Mexico Press. His photography of the ongoing abandonment of the high Great Plains resulted in the book of photographs entitled
Gone: Photographs of Abandonment on the High Plains (2003), after which a traveling exhibition was organized by the
University of New Mexico Art Museum. The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington purchased a selection of forty photographs from the series. His work in
Llano Estacado: Island in the Sky,
Texas Tech University Press, 2011 consisted of 10 photographs in color and 1 essay. Hal Fischer in
Artforum magazine in 1980 stated that "Fitch is a romantic, but his handling of subject resides somewhere between Pop rendition and a painterly, amorphous abstraction. Commonplace artifacts are seen as iconic forms, resilient symbols of mass culture. At his best, Fitch offers a Kerouacian vision—a solitary Western America deliriously glimpsed from a speeding car in the middle of the night. His synthetic depictions are expressionistic but measured, the West simultaneously understood as reality and myth." == Personal life ==