George Tice
B. 1938
It takes the passage of time before an image of a commonplace subject can be assessed. The great difficulty of what I attempt is seeing beyond the moment; the everydayness of life gets in the way of the eternal.
-George Tice, 1938
George Tice recently marked his fortieth year in photography. Born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1938, he joined the Cateret Camera Club at the age of fourteen. At sixteen he left high school to work as a darkroom assistant for a photo studio. A year later he enlisted in the U.S. Navy, serving as a photographer’s mate, after which he worked as a home portrait photographer for ten years.
When Tice’s interests shifted from professional to personal work, he turned his lens on the American Urban landscape, attempting to capture the spirit of place. This theme continues to fascinate him decades later. The combined strengths of his artistic vision and his meticulous technique have made him a photographer of considerable renown.
In 1959 Edward Steichen was among the first to recognize Tice’s talents, acquiring for the Museum of Modern Art, New York, one of his images of an explosion aboard the USS Wasp. Exhibited extensively in the United States and abroad, Tice’s work is represented in the permanent collections of many institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Bibliotheque Nationale.
In 1972 Tice was honored with a one man show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. his book Paterson was awarded the Grand Prix du Festival d’Arles in 1973. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowships, A National Endowment for the Arts grant, and most recently a fellowship from the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television (UK), as well as receiving commissions from The Field Museum of Natural History, The New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and the Museum of Modern Art.
Tice, long considered a virtuoso of the fine print, has made limited edition portfolios not only of his own work, including his acclaimed pictures of the Amish people, but of the work of such artists as Frederick H. Evans, Edward Weston, Francis Brugiere, and Edward Steichen, for whom Tice was master printer. In addition to giving workshops on printing, the photographer has taught a master class at the New School for Social Research since 1970. His writing, teaching, and exhibitions have done much to revive the lost art of platinum printing.
He is presently working on a photographic project, Ticetown, that encompasses the genealogy of his Dutch