Background

George A. Tice, born in Newark, New Jersey, United States, October 13, 1938, the son of a college-educated New Jerseyan, William S. Tice, and Margaret Robertson, a Traveller of Irish, Scottish, and Welsh stock with a fourth-grade education. George was raised by his mother, maintaining regular visiting contact with his father, whose influence and advice he valued highly.

Education

His first contact with photography was in the albums of family photographs belonging to his father, and this gave him the desire to create images of his own. George Tice began with a Kodak Brownie. In 1953, having bought a Kodak Pony, which gave him some control over exposure and focus, and a Kodak developing kit, he began to advance his craft. George Tice also joined the Carteret Camera Club. Tice's photographs of homeless men on the Bowery won second place in the black and white print competitions. George Tice decided at this point to make photography his career.

In 1955 George Tice attended the Newark Vocational and Technical High School, where he briefly studied commercial photography under Harve Wobbe. When he turned sixteen, he quit school and took a job as a darkroom assistant for Classic Photo, a portrait studio in Newark. He also worked as a stock boy at Kreske's Department Store in Newark, then as an office boy in the circulation department of the Newark Evening News.

In 1956 George Tice enlisted in the United States Navy, in which he rose to the rank of Photographer's Mate Third Class. After boot camp and two years at Naval Air Station Memphis, he was transferred to sea duty aboard the aircraft carrier, USS Wasp (CV-18).

Career

In 1960, now a civilian, George Tice joined the Vailsburg Camera Club and took a job as a family portrait photographer for Americana Portraits. That same year he began to make short trips to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania to photograph the Amish and Mennonite communities, using 35mm and medium format cameras. In 1964 George Tice began his series of tree photographs. By then he had learned all he could from the disciplines of the camera club and brought his involvement to an end. George Tice had his first solo exhibition at the Underground Gallery, New York and then decided to move with his family to California, where he continued his work in family portraits, but pursuing artistic projects like his series on the ghost town of Bodie, California on the edge of the Sierra Nevada range.

In 1967 George Tice bought a 4 x 5 Deardorff view camera and made studies of ice formations. In the same year, he traded in his 4 x 5 for an 8 x 10 view camera and began his aquatic plant series. He also produced his first photographs of Paterson, New Jersey, which became the subject of two books and exhibitions, Paterson and Paterson II.

George Tice met Lee Witkin in 1968 and used his knowledge of photography and its history to help him establish the Witkin Gallery in New York, one of the first successful galleries of photographic prints as fine art. He issued the portfolio, Trees, taught a workshop at Aspen, Colorado, and began to experiment with platinum printing, a lost art since the First World War. Tice's experimentation with early photographic processes continued in 1972 with his creation of a photogenic drawing of leaves printed in a contact frame exposed to sunlight onto hand-sensitized paper coated with diluted silver nitrate, in the manner of William Henry Fox Talbot, producing a Calotype negative.

In 1970 he began photographing coastal Maine this year and began teaching at the New School for Social Research. That year he also traveled to London and Paris with Lee Witkin in search of material for the Witkin Gallery. In 1971, Tice issued his portfolio, Bodie, with an introduction by Lee Witkin, printed an Evans portfolio from lantern slides, and published, again with Doubleday, Goodbye River Goodbye, with poetry by George Mendoza. In 1972 Life magazine sent him on assignment for the article "Home to Iowa."

Over the next decades, George Tice developed as a photographer - historian - a quality he had already shown in his interest in the history of photography as a collector and in his study and adoption of historical techniques.

Around 1976/77 George Tice acquired a Fujica soft-focus lens, and in this, he found another avenue to explore the history of photography and to invent it once again for his own artistic purposes. Over the next two years, he made a series of soft-focus photographs of a girlfriend, Deborah, and three white cats, which belonged to one of his daughters.

In 1982 George Tice printed a Steichen portfolio, Steichen: Twenty-Five Photographs, and another retrospective monograph, Urban Romantic: The Photographs of George Tice, issued by the esteemed publisher, David R. Godine, marking the beginning of Tice's aim to attempt to equal the quality of his original prints in his books. In 1983 George Tice turned to a new subject closely related to Lincoln. He traveled to the Midwest to photograph James Dean's Fairmount, Indiana, Ronald Reagan's Dixon, Illinois, and Mark Twain's Hannibal, Missouri. His fascination with legendary American men inspired him not only to seek out remembrances on every street corner but to go to the home towns of three Americans who rose from ordinary beginnings to set a historic stamp on society and culture.

George Tice had developed into a creator of books as a writer and editor as well as a photographer. He also regularly taught photography classes at numerous institutions including the Maine Photographic Workshop in Rockport, Maine, and Appalachian Photographic Workshops in Asheville, NC.

The following year, George Tice visited the U.S.S.R. on a cultural exchange, leading a group of American photographers together with Cole Weston and made some photographs, primarily street portraits. George Tice returned to the urban landscapes of New Jersey in 1994, when he began a project that was published eight years later as George Tice: Urban Landscapes. In 2006 he traveled to Belgium to work with Georges Charlier of Amanasalto for the production of Paterson II.

In 2010 filming began for a documentary about his career, George Tice: Seeing Beyond the Moment, by New Street Productions, premiered in 2013 at the Newark Museum as part of his seventy-fifth birthday celebrations, which included exhibitions at William Paterson University, The Newark Museum, the Scott Nichols Gallery, the Nailya Alexander Gallery, and the Point Light Gallery.

Achievements

• George Tice was established as a major figure in black and white fine art photography. He received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He was established as a classic observer of the American landscape, both urban and rural, and the world of the working American.
  
  George Tice was inducted into the New Jersey Literary Hall of Fame and awarded the "Michael," a prize designed by Michael Graves. In 1990, George Tice received a joint fellowship from the National Museum of Photography, Film, and Television (now the National Media Museum) in Bradford and from Ilkley College, Ilkley in Northern England.
  
  In October 2015 the Lucie Foundation honored George Tice with their Lucie Award for Lifetime Achievement at Carnegie Hall.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Paterson II

    (A 10th-generation native of New Jersey, renowned photogra...)

    2006
  • Fields of Peace: A Pennsylvania German Album

    (Photographer George Tice and novelist and poet Millen Bra...)

    1998
  • From Darkroom To Daylight

    (Harvey Wang explores the shift from film to digital throu...)

    2015
  • Seacoast Maine: Photographs by George Tice

    (A visual celebration that captures Maine's rockbound coas...)

    2015
  • George Tice: Selected Photographs, 1953-1999

    (The enduring work of photographer George Tice is represen...)

  • Goodbye, River, Goodbye 1971
  • Stone Walls, Grey Skies 1993
  • Lincoln 1984

• book1982

  • Urban Romantic: The photographs of George Tice 1982

• photography

  • Car for Sale

    1969

  • Oak Tree, Holmdel, NJ

    1970

  • Mennonite Meeting House, Lancaster, PA

    1990

  • Petit’s Mobil Station, Cherry Hill, NJ

    1974

  • Explosion Aboard the U.S.S. Wasp

    1959

  • Country Road

    1961

  • Garris' General Store

    1973

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• The New York Times, Feb 10, 1980: "There is neither satire nor sentimentality in his art, only recognition and, perhaps, awareness of the awful loneliness attendant on the pursuit of happiness."

Connections

George Tice married Joanna Blaylock in 1958, while he was serving in the U.S. Navy. A son, Christopher, was born. They divorced in 1960, following his discharge from the Navy. George Tice met and married Marie Tremmel the same year. They had four daughters, Loretta, Lisa, Lynn, and Jennifer. Tice and Marie Tremmel were divorced in 1977. Married Galina Kirlenco, of Russian descent, in 1984, divorced in 1986.

Father:

William S. Tice

Mother:

Margaret Robertson

Spouse:

Joanna Blaylock

Spouse:

Marie Tremmel

Spouse:

Galina Kirlenco

Son:

Christopher

Daughter:

Loretta

Daughter:

Lisa

Daughter:

Lynn

Daughter:

Jennifer

colleague:

Lee Witkin

George A. Tice met Lee Witkin in 1968 and used his knowledge of photography and its history to help him establish the Witkin Gallery in New York, one of the first successful galleries of photographic prints as fine art.