On Aug. 18, 1959, George Tice was a Navy photographer’s mate third class on the aircraft carrier Wasp when an explosion in a hangar bay rocked the ship in the Atlantic Ocean, about 250 miles from Norfolk, Va.
He rushed to the flight deck, camera in hand, and took pictures of sailors extinguishing a fire in a helicopter before they pushed it overboard. The Navy said the accident was caused when one helicopter engine “overspeeded” and exploded during testing, consuming it and two other helicopters in flames. Two men died and 21 were injured.
One of Mr. Tice’s dramatic pictures of the scene was syndicated by The Associated Press and ran on the front page of The New York Times. It was noticed by the renowned photographer Edward Steichen, then the director of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, who asked the Navy for a print for its collection.
“I was 20 years old,” Mr. Tice told New Jersey Monthly in 2014. “I thought, I must be an artist.”
Broad recognition for his artistry — his work would be compared to Walker Evans’s documentary photos and the urban realism of Edward Hopper’s paintings — would not come for a while. After being discharged from the Navy, Mr. Tice became a portrait photographer of children and families.
On the side, though, he had begun spending time in Paterson, N.J., a down-at-the-heels industrial city, where he found beauty in the prosaic: A barbershop with a man behind its window, waiting to snip. The Passaic Falls. A car for sale in a driveway. Rooftops.
Mr. Tice was attracted to Paterson as a subject after he stood on Garret Mountain, which rises above the city out of parkland. From there, Paterson looked like a “miniature model of a city,” he told The Times in 2002. “It’s isolated — the mountain on one side, the Passaic River on the other side. It’s all enclosed. It’s a place unto itself.”
He was able to leave portrait photography in 1970, when his prints of Paterson and the people of Amish country in Lancaster County, Pa., where he had also moonlighted, began to sell at the Witkin Gallery in Manhattan, which he helped establish.
His reputation quickly grew, with his photographs appearing in magazines and in exhibitions around the country. His Paterson photos were shown at the New Jersey Historical Society in Newark in 1971 and were then the subject of a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art a year later. The pictures were also reproduced that year in a book, “Paterson.”
Over the next half century, Mr. Tice came to be seen as a photographic bard of New Jersey, traveling the state with his bulky 8×10 view camera and shooting pieces of its urban landscape. These included a phone booth in Rahway, lit up at 3 a.m. but shrouded in darkness; a White Castle, also in Rahway, captured from the back at night and looking like a desolate little burger outpost; and, in his most famous photo, also taken at night, a Mobil station in Cherry Hill with a massive water tower looming in the background like an alien spaceship.
“Now 42, Mr. Tice has done so much of his greatest work in New Jersey that he has become a metaphor for the state — a photographic equivalent of William Carlos Williams,” Vivien Raynor wrote in her Times review of an exhibition of Mr. Tice’s work at the Woodman Gallery in Middletown, N.J., in 1981.
Mr. Tice lived in Middletown, and he died there, at his home, on Jan. 16 at 86. His daughter Jennifer Tice-Spagnoli said the cause was complications of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Until a few days before he died, Mr. Tice, who was a master printer, was still hoping to revise his book “Lifework” (2022), a career retrospective.
“He took me aside,” Ms. Tice-Spagnoli said, “and he said, ‘I want to look at my book one more time.’ He was still critiquing it, and he wanted to perfect it.”
It was typical of his darkroom work ethic.
“He never gave up,” his daughter said in an interview. “I’d be in the darkroom with him, and we’d evaluate a picture, and he’d say, ‘I think we need to make a few changes,’ and we would, and I’d think it was good, but he’d say, ‘No,’ and we’d do it over and over.”
George Andrew Tice was born on Oct. 13, 1938, in Newark. His parents divorced when he was very young, and he was raised by his mother, Margaret (Robertson) Tice, a member of the Irish Travelers ethnic community. His mother peddled Irish linens door to door, and the family lived largely in trailer parks, in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Florida. She later remarried.
From age 6 to age 16, George sold crepe paper roses, both on his own and with relatives.
His father, William Tice, was an insurance underwriter. He was also an amateur photographer, and his albums ignited George’s passion for storytelling through photography.
“He could show with 12 albums his whole life, from the time he was born until his death,” Mr. Tice said in an interview with the visual artist John Paul Caponigro in 1996 for View Camera magazine. “I thought that was an incredible thing.”
As a teenager, George traded up from a Kodak Brownie camera to a 35-millimeter Kodak Pony; joined a camera club in Carteret, N.J., where he impressed the other members, all of them adult men; turned his family’s trailer into a darkroom, to the chagrin of his stepfather, John Hahn; photographed downtrodden men on the Bowery in Manhattan; and worked as a darkroom assistant at a photo studio.
At 17, he joined the Navy He was sent for training in a photo lab before being assigned to the carrier Wasp.
The photo of the Wasp explosion’s aftermath — a frame full of frantic sailors in the throes of an emergency — would be an unusual entry in Mr. Tice’s oeuvre; people do not appear in most of his photos from New Jersey and beyond. There were exceptions, though: Amish boys dressed in black and playing in the snow; a little boy standing on a corner in Tallinn, Estonia, looking wary as a man in a cap approaches him; a couple on their houseboat in Jersey City.
Mr. Tice made his living by selling prints and his many books, including “Fields of Peace: A Pennsylvania German Album” (1970), mostly about the Amish and Mennonites; “Lincoln” (1984), a homage for which he photographed statues of the 16th president and motels, cars and other objects named for him; and “Stone Walls, Grey Skies: A Vision of Yorkshire” (1993), documenting a sojourn in England.
“That I would do a Lincoln book didn’t occur to me until the night I came upon the Lincoln Motel and Abe’s Disco,” Mr. Tice told The Central New Jersey Home News in 1984. “There he was, right in the heart of Newark, all lit up in neon and flashing lights. My mission was clear; I would travel America looking for Lincoln.”
In addition to Ms. Tice-Spagnoli, he is survived by three other daughters, Loretta and Lisa Tice and Lynn Mesler, all from his marriage to Marie Tremmel, which ended in divorce; a son, Christopher, from his marriage to Joanna Blaylock, which also ended in divorce; three half brothers, Jack and Robert Hahn and Glenn Tice; nine grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren. A third marriage also ended in divorce.
Mr. Tice, whose photographs are in the collections of many museums, received fellowships in 1973 from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was the subject of a documentary, “George Tice: Seeing Beyond the Moment” (2013), directed by Bruce Wodder.
In that film, Mr. Tice described his emphasis on the mundane rather than the spectacular in his photography.
“The everydayness of life gets in the way of the eternal,” he said. “I contemplate how this photograph will be seen in the future, when the subject matter no longer endures.
“Taking a picture is, indeed, stopping the world.”
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