The Poetry of the Everyday: The Photographs of George Tice
by A. D. Coleman

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

Garry Winogrand once said of Walker Evans's classic 1938 book American Photographs that it "showed that America was a place you could photograph in." He was echoing -- probably unconsciously -- Beat Generation novelist Jack Kerouac's wishful midcentury boast that he could "make Topeka holy," presumably by locating and exposing the soulful core of that stereotypical midwestern city.  

And both, in turn, spoke from the same set of inspirations: those who, from Whitman and Twain through Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charles Ives, Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe, Martha Graham, William Carlos Williams, and Evans himself (among countless others), have asserted and demonstrated by example that there is a uniquely American art and music and dance and literature to be made. And that the precepts and raw materials and subjects and themes of such work can derive not from Europe but from the specifics of this land: its history, its culture, its terrain and topography, its people, its languages, and -- especially for visual artists -- its light.

Though he has made some fine photographs elsewhere, George Tice has spent his working life showing that America is "a place you can photograph in" and, in the spirit of Kerouac, making it holy. Not in any sanctimonious sense; just providing tangible evidence that this country is as soulful, as imbued with mystery and magic, as anywhere else, and that prolonged meditation on it, even on its mundane particulars, will serve no less well as a path to exaltation and transcendence than a cathedral in France or a rock garden in Japan.

"No ideas but in things," wrote William Carlos Williams in his epic poem Paterson (1946), embodying this thought most concretely in his famous lyric poem "The Red Wheelbarrow." Photography, by its nature, deals with particulars -- with specific things and the light that bounces off them. Because they form his immediate context, the "things" to which Tice has devoted most of his attention are found along the eastern seaboard of the United States, especially within his native New Jersey, where his roots go back for ten generations. Over the years he has concentrated much of his activity in and around the city of Paterson, sharing with Dr. Williams the conviction that it could serve as ground and subject for an epic statement.

Like Williams, who wrote and published his long poem in installments, Tice has returned again and again to this archetypal North American city, and has now entered his fifth decade of scrutiny thereof. Paterson exemplifies the cities of the eastern United States, compressed by the ocean on one side and the vastness of the continent on the other. Tice's first book on this theme, Paterson (1972), was celebrated with a solo show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, making Tice one of the few living photographers ever to have exhibited at the Met at that time, and certainly one of the youngest. That book brought Tice considerable critical recognition, as well as personal notes of appreciation from such cognoscenti as Berenice Abbott, Harry Callahan, Robert Adams, Ralph Steiner, and John Szarkowski. It remains the most long-term, extensive, and serious response to this city that any creative photographer has undertaken. (In 2006 he published Paterson II, which gathered the images he'd made there since the first volume appeared.)

Tice tends to work on large-scale projects, and to resolve those projects in coherent book and exhibition forms. His work has taken him across the continental United States, and abroad to England and the former Soviet Union. He's drawn particularly to small, nondescript cities and ever smaller towns, where one or more centuries of human occupation remain visible. His ninth book, Lincoln (1984), celebrated the 175th anniversary of the birth of U.S. president Abraham Lincoln by presenting images made in cities named after Lincoln, civic statues of him, and various sites and objects that use his name, including a motel and a luxury automobile. For his 1988 book Hometowns: An American Pilgrimage he visited the birthplaces of three very different but now iconic Americans: James Dean (Fairmount, Indiana), Ronald Reagan (Dixon, Illinois), and Mark Twain (Hannibal, Missouri).

Born in 1938, Tice came to photography via what was then a traditional route. Beginning as a teenage hobbyist, he joined the local camera club to hone his skills, studied commercial photography in high school, dropped out to work as a darkroom assistant in a Newark portrait studio, then enlisted in the U.S. Navy at the age of 17, quickly becoming head photographer aboard the U.S.S. Wasp, an aircraft carrier. A photograph he made in that role, of the Wasp's crew pushing overboard a helicopter that had accidentally caught on fire, appeared on the front page of the New York Times. There it caught the eye of Edward Steichen, then director of the Museum of Modern Art's Department of Photographs, who requested a print for MoMA collection. Tice was 20 years old at the time.

For a decade after he got out of the Navy, Tice supported himself and his family by working as a home portrait photographer. During that period he turned to large-format cameras for his personal work and mastered the craft of printmaking. Fortuitously, he also met the late Lee Witkin and helped him establish the Witkin Gallery, which became the the first successful commercial gallery in New York City dedicated to creative photography. The resulting exposure to classic works of 19th- and early 20th-century photography led Tice to explore the then-obsolete process of platinum printing, which he first recuperated for his own work and then began teaching to others at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan and elsewhere.

This made Tice a charter member of what's now called the "alternative processes" movement, which has reintroduced many previously abandoned techniques for negative and print production to the toolkit of contemporary photography. By 1970, the combination of demand for his prints and income from teaching enabled Tice to concentrate entirely on his own photography and the custom-printing of creative work by others. His skills as a printmaker, plus his association with Witkin, led to commissions that involved Tice producing, from the original negatives, limited-edition portfolios of works by such figures as Edward Weston, Frederick H. Evans, Francis Bruguière, Ralph Steiner, and Lewis Hine.

In 1973 Rolf Petersen, who had printed Steichen's work for decades, retired from that role. Grace Mayer, who had served as Steichen's assistant at the Museum of Modern Art, recommended Tice to Steichen as a replacement. Tice thus became the last person to print for Steichen in his lifetime, and continued in that role for years after his death in 1973. One project that came from that collaboration was the posthumous set of limited-edition portfolios issued in 1985, in which, image by image, Tice strove to match Steichen's original vision with prints made on a range of contemporary photographic papers -- certainly the most ambitious group of estate prints produced up to that point, and the only one undertaken by a photographer internationally recognized for his own work.

As all this suggests, Tice's models are not the "New York School" photographers -- Winogrand, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Helen Levitt -- whose quick glimpses with small cameras defined urban America in the popular imagination during the second half of the last century. What Tice shares with them is a search for the poetics of the quotidian, the epiphanies that lurk in the humdrum. But Tice works primarily with a nineteenth-century instrument, the 8x10 view camera, which encourages (indeed, requires) a more deliberate, considered approach to the construction of images, and whose large negative encodes vastly greater amounts of data than does the 35-mm. negative. These images are not fleeting glances but long, hard looks at their subjects, contemplations, loaded with detail, so rich you can get lost in them.

And, though Tice's pictures sometimes include people, their visible presence in the flesh is rarely central to his vision, which instead investigates a largely depopulated urban and rural environment, a set of physical structures rather than social interactions. To the extent that he concerns himself with the past and present inhabitants of these locales, he addresses them through what they have built there and the marks they have left behind, not through the activities and behaviors of the present-day citizenry. In that sense, his motive is more archaeological than sociological. His predecessors are figures such as Walker Evans, Berenice Abbott, Eugène Atget, and Frederick H. Evans.

"It was, above all else, civilization I was after," Tice affirms in a statement about his Paterson project that applies to his entire body of work. He has given us the unmistakable traces of civilization here, in all of what he calls its "sad beauty." In most of these images humans are transient, usually invisible; the man-made structures deteriorate gradually but inexorably; a tamed nature persists, survives, and, relentlessly, wherever it can, asserts itself, encroaches. The melancholy decrepitude of these settings suggests a loss of energy that could prove irreversible. The overall mood of Tice's project is elegiac.

Yet Paterson endures, as do the other towns and cities Tice has shown us. Like Atget before him in Paris, Tice in his photographs does not contemplate a context that will cease to exist, but a representative cross-section of spaces, imbued with human history, that await their next transformation.