Robert Witten Fichter is an American photographer.

Born in Fort Myers, Florida

Fort Myers, Florida

Fort Myers is the county seat and commercial center of Lee County, Florida, United States. Its population was 62,298 in the 2010 census, a 29.23 percent increase over the 2000 figure....

, he attended the University of Florida

University of Florida

The University of Florida is an American public land-grant, sea-grant, and space-grant research university located on a campus in Gainesville, Florida. The university traces its historical origins to 1853, and has operated continuously on its present Gainesville campus since September 1906...

, Gainesville, where he studied under Jerry Uelsmann

Jerry Uelsmann

Jerry N. Uelsmann is an American photographer.Uelsmann was born in Detroit, Michigan. When he was in high school, his interest in photography sparked. He originally believed that using a camera could allow him to exist outside of himself, to live in a world captured through the lens...

, Ken Kerslake

Ken Kerslake

Fine artist Ken Kerslake was, according to Dr. Tom Dewey of the University of Mississippi,"one of a handful of printmaker-educators responsible for the growth of printmaking in the southeast in the years following World War II." Kerslake's teaching career was spent at the University of Florida in...

 and Jack Nicholsen and received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1963. He continued his studies under Henry Holmes Smith

Henry Holmes Smith

Henry Holmes Smith was an American photographer and one of most influential fine art photography teachers of the mid 20th century. He was inspired by the work that had been done at the German Bauhaus and in 1937 was invited to teach photography at the New Bauhaus being founded by Moholy-Nagy in...

 at Indiana University

Indiana University

Indiana University is a multi-campus public university system in the state of Indiana, United States. Indiana University has a combined student body of more than 100,000 students, including approximately 42,000 students enrolled at the Indiana University Bloomington campus and approximately 37,000...

, Bloomington earning a Masters of Fine Arts in 1966.

In 1966, Fichter moved to Rochester, NY and worked as an Assistant Curator of Exhibitions at George Eastman House

George Eastman House

The George Eastman House is the world's oldest museum dedicated to photography and one of the world's oldest film archives, opened to the public in 1949 in Rochester, New York, USA. World-renowned for its photograph and motion picture archives, the museum is also a leader in film preservation and...

 International Museum of Photography working under Nathan Lyons

Nathan Lyons

Nathan Lyons is an American artist and photographer who currently lives and works in New York. The artist's body of work consists primarily of photographs which focus on American culture...

. In 1969, Nathan Lyons founded Visual Studies Workshop, a non-profit education and media arts center with which Fichter would maintain a lasting association.

Leaving the Eastman House in 1968, Fichter became an Assistant Professor at UCLA, where he taught with Robert Heineken and Todd Walker

Todd Walker (photographer)

Todd Walker was an American photographer, printmaker and creator of artists' books who is known for his manipulated images and for his use of offset lithography to produce individual prints and limited-edition books of his work....

. From 1971 - 1975, Fichter held visiting artist and teaching positions at UCLA, the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan and at Florida State University

Florida State University

The Florida State University is a space-grant and sea-grant public university located in Tallahassee, Florida, United States. It is a comprehensive doctoral research university with medical programs and significant research activity as determined by the Carnegie Foundation...

. He became an Assistant Professor at Florida State University in 1971, and continued to teach there, also serving as Associate Professor and Department Chair, until his retirement in 2006.

To date, Fichter has had more than forty one-person shows; including a major retrospective, Robert Fichter: Photography and Other Questions, in 1982. Originating at the George Eastman International Museum of Photography, Rochester, New York, this exhibition toured the country from 1982-85. He has also participated in hundreds of group exhibitions. Fichter has also published extensively, coordinated numerous photography exhibitions and given lectures all around the country.

Beginning in the 1960s, Fichter was at the forefront of experimental photography; combining drawing, hand photoengraving processes and photographic images in his photographic practice. Of this process, which he calls Print-Photo-Fusion, Fichter writes:

"Printmaking, at the heart of the matter, is about transferring a mark from one surface to another. It offers artists and others a mass production system of distribution of images and words. This frequently allows lower costs per unit of production than say, Painting. When you put photos through untraditional processes, then you get new traditions."

Awards include: two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, 1979 and 1984; Honored Photo Educator, South Eastern Regional Meeting, Society for Photographic Education, Dayton Beach, Fla. 1999. Currently, Fichter is working with Mark Alexander of Arts Services, to move the Robert Fichter Archive to the University of Maryland Baltimore County, UMBC, where it will become available for research in May 2010.

Fichter lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife Nancy Smith Fichter. They serve as the Co-Directors of The Lillian E. Smith Center for Creative Arts, at Clayton, GA, a not-for-profit arts group whose mission is to offer a place where gifted creative artists and scholars in various disciplines may find the conditions of quiet solitude and privacy in which to pursue their work.