Fitch received his master's degree in fine arts from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque in 1978. After graduating, He accepted a teaching position at the University of Colorado in Boulder. In 1981, as a member of the "Marks and Measures" project, he began photographing prehistoric Native American pictograph and petroglyph sites in the American West, funded by the last National Endowment for the Arts Survey Grant in 1981. His work on the project, along with that of the other four project members, was published in a monograph, Marks in Place: Contemporary Responses to Rock Art, by the University of New Mexico Press in 1988.
In 1990, after teaching at Princeton University for four years in the Visual Arts Program, Fitch returned to New Mexico and began photographing the ongoing abandonment of the High Great Plains, receiving the Eliot Porter Fellowship from the New Mexico Council for Photography in 1999 to aid in the completion of this project. In 2003, a book of these photographs entitled Gone: Photographs of Abandonment on the High Plains, published by the University of New Mexico Press and the University of New Mexico Art Museum, was organized into a traveling exhibition. Fitch's work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Modern Art, New York; J. Paul Getty Museum; Amon Carter Museum, Center for Creative Photography, California Museum of Photography, among others.
