Remembering George A. Tice

A View Seldom Seen

Mar 06, 2025

George A. Tice, *Lakeview Grill, September 1970*, from the portfolio Paterson,1970 (Website: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art)

Had George Tice been an essayist instead of a photographer, his work would be the kind kept on bedside tables. His paragraphs and sentences, both beautifully constructed and with a keen eye on the small moments that make up a lifetime, would be read and re-read as if they were poems. Or had his craft been regional cuisine, he’d be the chef finding inspiration in the comfort food specialties of Passaic County, even those hot dogs that are deep fried and known as “rippers.”

Tice, a tenth-generation native of New Jersey, began his artistic career as twenty-year-old Navy’s photographer mate third class. When an explosion he captured on film made the front page of The New York Times, he decided that he “must be an artist,” although once he returned to his home state, he concerned himself with imagery that was far less dramatic. With his camera Tice found “beauty in the prosaic: bars, phone booths, hamburger joints, barber shops—first in a downtrodden Paterson, then throughout the state and beyond.”

To other photographers, museum curators, and gallery owners, his black-and-white prints (silver gelatin and platinum) are standouts of “impeccable quality.” Each one is a masterclass in framing. To the New Jersey crowd, he’s adored on another level, owing to the attention he paid to local settings that were instantly known. Tice’s first major portfolio and museum exhibit, Paterson, illuminated the garden state’s third most-populous city. Though the subjects might be called humble, the collection began his ascent as a major contributor to his craft. It’s quite something to come across the photographs “Joe’s Barbershop” and “Car for Sale” on the website Galerie Gadcollection (its brick and mortar “in the center of Paris”). Both prints are listed under the thème “street photography,” suggesting the still-lifes have some connection to a rue dotted with left bank cafes and not the pocked sidewalks of the same Paterson where my grandmother rooted herself after leaving Belarus (making me a third-generation native of the city).

I learned that George Tice passed away on January 16^th when my editor sent me an email with The New York Times article titled, “George Tice, ‘Bard of New Jersey’ With a Camera, Dies at 86.” As the cliché describes, seeing the headline took my breath away. Searching Substack for kindred spirits (was he known by anyone else on my only social media platform?), I found the piece

Andy Adams

had written, which is an excellent resource and entry for anyone not yet familiar with Tice. It’s true, as Adams subtitled his piece, that Tice was a “photography legend.” His work is held in the permanent collections of several museums (that includes the J. Getty Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Whitney, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art) and his limited-edition prints are represented by galleries in San Francisco and London and (as mentioned) Paris. Everything in Lifework, photographs from 1953 to 2013 and his last publication, is extraordinary. But for me, it’s always been the aching familiarity of his New Jersey landscapes and cityscapes.

George Tice was a kind of muse for my work, the artist who first gave me permission to appreciate all the tiny, overlooked corners of New Jersey. He was drawn to Paterson, which he saw as uniquely American, given its place as the country’s first industrial city (the brainchild of Alexander Hamilton). But he also saw the city as what it had become: a collection of many neighborhoods, each of them containing the run-of-the-mill and the seemingly unremarkable.

His black-and-white images took the viewer straight into Paterson, with all the abrasions the rust belt economy of the 1970s had meted out, and more abrasions clearly on the horizon, and with them, Tice told the story of a particular American culture in its decline. That portfolio wasn’t only the story of a rust belt city. Streetscapes and residents that could be called ordinary were made compelling—and they along with their tired city were seen. Tice has described the “sad beauty” of his urban scenes, and how the scenes have a “different weight, the weight of history, not moments, but stories evolving.”

George Tice’s early-career focus on small, overlooked cities overlapped with a trend in crime fiction in the 1970s, when settings for detective novels were moving out of LA and New York and becoming increasingly regional. With an expansion into less cosmopolitan locales across the country, the stories were close-to-the-ground snapshots of “that moment in the early 1970s when the troops were coming home and the country was going to seed.”

The overlap between Tice and crime fiction wasn’t confined to the timing—not a 1970s thing. As cities reveal themselves in photographs, “[i]n detective novels, cities are evolving, multifaceted entities as compelling as any human character.” To write historical fiction, historical crime fiction, is to be tasked with creating everyday details and bringing a world of specificity to the reader.

Crime novels are snow globes of time and place. Alongside the protagonist—the private eye, the cop—the reader is taken on a search for details. Settling in with a crime novel, a reader can expect to be brought into a small town or a decaying city. There will be drives along local roads or the interstate just on the outskirts, and by the end, the reader will know that place and all of its problems, big and small and full of consequence.

It’s no surprise that when I turned to writing a police procedural and set out to have my readers travel back to 1970s Paterson, I instinctively went to George Tice’s prints. With his recent passing, there’s been a sadness (I never had the chance to meet him) and also the weight of responsibility. More than ever, I want to feel that I’ve captured the sense of place that the city deserves—and that in the smallest possible way, my fictional world stays true to the “impeccable quality” of a George Tice photograph.

George Tice and his work will always hold a special place in my heart—for me, he was the first artist who said yes to the quotidian and yes to small moments and yes to Paterson.

Godspeed.

Author’s Note

In my publishing journey, leading to the upcoming release of my debut novel Nightswimming, set in Paterson in the 1970s, I’ve been absolutely blessed to have found a bonus of artists who share my passion for Silk City. Their beautiful photographs further inspired my writing and became much welcome visual support for the world-building of a bygone era of Paterson: Michael R. Sporzarsky, whose streetscape of downtown Paterson is the cover art for my novel (courtesy of the Paterson Museum) and Rich Green, whose collection of black-and-white photographs invigorate my website.