George Andrew Tice (October 13, 1938 – January 16, 2025) was an American photographer. His work depicts a broad range of American life, landscape, and urban environment, mostly photographed in his native New Jersey. He lived all his life in New Jersey, except for his service in the U.S. Navy, a brief period in California, a fellowship in the United Kingdom, and summer workshops in Maine, where he taught at the Maine Photographic Workshops, now the Maine Media Workshops.
Tice's work is held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Center for Creative Photography, J. Paul Getty Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Whitney Museum.
Early life and entry into photography George A. Tice was born in Newark, New Jersey, on October 13, 1938, the son of insurance underwriter William S. Tice and Margaret Robertson, a Traveller of Irish, Scottish, and Welsh ancestry with a fourth grade education. In 1663, Tice's Belgian ancestors settled in Brooklyn and their firstborn son, Peter Tyson, moved to Monmouth County, New Jersey, in 1709, making Tice a tenth-generation New Jerseyan. Though George was raised by his mother, he regularly visited his father for advice until William's death when George was 19."George A. Tice," by Maria C. Sánchez, in The Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century Photography, ed. Lynne Warren, Routledge, New York, London, 2005, p. 1538.
His first contact with photography was in the albums of family photographs belonging to his father, which gave him the desire to create images of his own. He 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. He also joined the Carteret Camera Club. Tice's photographs of homeless men on the Bowery won second place in the black-and-white print competition. It was at this point that he decided to make photography his career.
In 1955, he 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 Kresge’s Department Store in Newark, then as an office boy in the circulation department of the Newark Evening News. It was at this job that he learned about the death of the actor James Dean through a clipping about his death. Tice later adopted Dean as one of his subjects in Hometowns: An American Pilgrimage.
In 1956, Tice enlisted in the United States Navy. Despite scoring well on an IQ test, Tice was denied admission to the Navy's photography school and assigned to work as a messenger because he had not graduated high school. However, Tice ultimately convinced a superior officer to transfer him into a 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. One of the photographs he made on board, Explosion Aboard the U.S.S. Wasp, 1959, was published on the front page of The New York Times. Edward Steichen, then Director of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, was struck by the image and requested a print for the museum's collection."New York: Georges Tice, the mythical printer", The Eye of Photography. Accessed February 2, 2025. "George Tice came to Steichen’s attention when he saw Tice’s dramatic photograph of an explosion aboard the U.S.S. Wasp on the front page of the New York Times and acquired it for MoMA’s collection. Tice was 20 years old at the time." That same year, Tice received an honorable discharge.
Early career In 1960, now a civilian, Tice joined the Vailsburg Camera Club and took a job as a family portrait photographer for Americana Portraits. As an active member of the club, he exhibited in international salons. 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, he began his series of tree photographs and ended his association with the Vailsburg Camera Club, believing that he had learned all he could from its members. Tice had his first solo exhibition at the Underground Gallery in New York City and then moved with his family to California, where he pursued artistic projects like his series on the ghost town of Bodie, California, on the edge of the Sierra Nevada range.Bodie: Twelve Original Photographs, Harry Ransom Center. Accessed February 2, 2025. "The photographs are views and studies made in Bodie, California, an abandoned mining town just east of the Sierra Nevada mountain range."
Only six months after moving to Irvington, California, Tice moved his family back to New Jersey due to his wife's homesickness and his dissatisfaction with the lower pay for portrait photography. In 1967 he 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. The following year he published The Amish Portfolio, a set of twelve, limited-edition prints with an introduction by Jacob Deschin. With his advance from Doubleday for Fields of Peace he bought a brand new 8 x 10 Deardorff, which remained his preferred instrument.
Maturity In 1968, Tice met Lee Witkin, and they combined their knowledge of the history of photography to establish the Witkin Gallery in New York. That year, Tice issued the portfolio Trees, taught a workshop in Aspen, Colorado, and began to experiment with platinum printing, a lost art since World War I when wartime platinum prices forced manufacturers of the special printing paper out of business. Since William Willis' patents insufficiently described the paper used for printing, Tice reinvented the process and detailed his efforts in a 1970 issue of the British photography journal Album. In 1972, Tice continued to experiment with early photographic processes by printing a photogenic drawing of leaves in a contact frame exposed to sunlight onto hand-sensitized paper coated with diluted silver nitrate, resembling Henry Fox Talbot's Calotype negatives.
In 1970, Doubleday published Tice's first book, Fields of Peace: A Pennsylvania German Album, with text by Millen Brand. That year, he photographed coastal Maine, taught at The New School for Social Research, and traveled to London and Paris with Lee Witkin. Together, they met with Frederick H. Evans' son, who sold them a block of platinum prints and lantern slides 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." Rutgers University Press published Paterson, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art presented a solo exhibition, Paterson, New Jersey. Doubleday published Seacoast Maine: People and Places, with a text by Martin Dibner.
Tice received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Paterson was awarded the Grand Prix du Festival d'Arles. In the last year of his life, Edward Steichen appointed Tice as printer of his negatives, a role which Tice fulfilled until 1998 by printing several portfolios of Steichen's work. Tice also made prints of photographs by Frederick H. Evans, Francis Bruguière, and Edward Weston, which were issued by the Witkin Gallery. In 1975, the Witkin Gallery presented a twenty-year retrospective of Tice's work accompanied by the book George A. Tice, Photographs: 1953–1973, which was published by the Rutgers University Press.
Ansel Adams recommended Tice for a commission by the Field Museum of Natural History to make a pair of murals of Sapelo Island. Life sent Tice to Hutchinson, Kansas, to contribute to its special report "One Day in the Life of America."
Around 1976/77, Tice acquired a Fujica soft-focus lens, which he used over the next two years for a series of photographs of a girlfriend, Deborah, and three white cats, one of which belonged to his daughters. Whereas modern photographers treated soft focus as a flaw producing cloudy glows, Tice praised the effect as one lost along the history of photography.
Urban Landscapes: A New Jersey Portrait followed in 1976, again from the Rutgers University Press, an expansion of Tice's vision of the gritty cities of industrial New Jersey. As in Paterson, Tice explored scenes of the working man's environment that survived only precariously at the time, soon to disappear forever. Although his subject-matter, technique, and style extend far beyond that, almost to the point of universality, the urban scene of New Jersey remained his most familiar vein.
In 1977, Tice produced Artie Van Blarcum: An Extended Portrait, documenting the life of a Tri-County Camera Club member. When Tice decided to create a book about him, Blarcum reluctantly allowed Tice to watch his daily life. Blarcum, then 52, was presented as a New Jersey everyman who was a third-generation factory worker sharing his family home with his brother. Tice used Blarcum's amateur photography to critique art that intends to suit the tastes of competition judges by perfecting one's technique on banal subject matter. After Blarcum's death, Tice presented his archives to William Paterson University, which exhibited them from September 8 – October 16, 2015.
Later career After reading Carl Sandburg's biographies of Abraham Lincoln in 1981 and coming across the Lincoln Motel & Abe's Disco in Newark, New Jersey, Tice began a series cataloging physical depictions of Lincoln across the United States, ranging from the grand Lincoln Memorial to simpler murals in Lincoln, Illinois. In 1984, Rutgers University Press published this series of photographs.
In 1982 Tice printed a portfolio of Edward Steichen's work, Steichen: Twenty-Five Photographs, and another retrospective monograph, Urban Romantic: The Photographs of George Tice, issued by the publisher David R. Godine, marking the beginning of Tice's attempt to equal the quality of his original prints in his books. In 1983, he traveled to the Midwest to photograph the hometowns of legendary American men: James Dean's Fairmount, Indiana, Ronald Reagan's Dixon, Illinois, and Mark Twain's Hannibal, Missouri. In this series, Tice aimed to capture both the social fabric that supported their rise and the remembrances of their lives.
Tice also regularly taught photography classes at numerous institutions including Parson's School of Design in NYC, the Maine Photographic Workshop in Rockport, Maine, and Appalachian Photographic Workshops in Asheville, NC.
The following year, Tice and Cole Weston led a group of American photographers on a cultural exchange program to the Soviet Union. Tice printed a second Steichen portfolio, In the Studio, 12 photographs. In 1985, Evelyne Daitz took over Lee Witkin's gallery in the wake of his death, running it until 1999. Further Steichen portfolios appeared in 1986, Juxtapositions, 12 photographs, and 1987, The Blue Sky, 12 photographs. Tice was inducted into the New Jersey Literary Hall of Fame and awarded the "Michael," a prize designed by Michael Graves. Hometowns: An American Pilgrimage, was published by New York Graphic Society in 1988.