George Tice
Artie Van Blarcum
An Extended Portrait by George A. Tice
Published by Addison House, 1977
“George Tice is a gifted and sensitive photographer who has taken for his domain the ordinary life of ordinary people. He draws close with his eyes and ears to people like the subject of this book, Artie Van Blarcum, and attends them, rather as his fellow New Jersey social observer and artist William Carlos Williams used to do. That is, he pays them the ultimate respect of concern, involvement, devoted and watchful attention. He is intent on celebrating their individuality, their unique qualities of mind and heart. He is, essentially, class-less in sensibility, as all true artist are. He is comfortable with the particular, not the general, the concrete rather than the abstract. he sees in one somewhat private, and maybe, isolated person, Artie Van Blarcum, a reflection of all of us – our struggle for meaning in this brief time we have, our struggle for closeness and affection, balanced by the coldness and worse that the social world threatens to impose upon each of us. This book stands in the American genre of careful, thoughtful, social observation, as done by writers and artists: Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams, Edward Curtis and Walker Evans, James Agee and Dorothea Lange. One man’s life, pictured and spoken, presents to us, finally, what life is about for each of us, however differently, we pursue it: a struggle for purpose, coherence, and the bonds of affiliation that keeps us warm – until we die” -Robert Coles
96 pages, 56 illustrations, softcover, signed
Price: $20.00
Fields of Peace:
A Pennsylvania German Album
by George Tice
Published by David Godine; Revised Edition, January, 1998
Fields of Peace unites two remarkable talents in masterful volume. The text, written by the late Millen Brand, illuminates the history of the Pennsylvania German sects who were united in their rejection of infant baptism. He provides a sympathetic portrait of these fascinating people (often erroneously called “Pennsylvania Dutch”) who emigrated from Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries, found a home in the sympathetic commonwealth of William Penn, and settled primarily in and around Lancaster County. Primarily Amish and Mennonites, these are quiet and modest people whose lives of determined simplicity and whose passion for land seem totally anomalous in modern America. They continue to live lives of determined simplicity and agrarian focus that have all but disappeared.
The photographs by George Tice are some of the most compelling documentary imagery ever framed. In their unobtrusive vision, they capture the substance and the spirit of these self-reliant people. They also reflect over thirty years of gentle but persistent efforts to document their lives and record their customs. For George Tice, this has been a life work, and the breadth and generosity of his vision is manifest on every page.
First published in 1970 and here entirely reset with 39 new images added and every photograph reshot for duotone reproduction (as well as a new foreword by Sue Bender and a new afterword by Tice), this is not a “revised edition” but an entirely new book; one that will surely take its place among the classic documentary works of this century.
176 pages, 180 duotone illustrations, Hardcover, signed
Price: $50.00
Paterson II
by George Tice
Published by Quantuck Lane, 2006
A 10th-generation native of New Jersey, renowned photographer George Tice began his thirty-year documentation of the vernacular architecture of his home state with Paterson in 1972, which formed part of his acclaimed one-man show at Metropolitan Museum of Art. His most iconic images from this exploration are White Castle, Route 1, Rahway, N.J., and Petit’s Mobil Station, Cherry Hill, N.J. In Paterson II, Tice revisits his source of inspiration, adding scores of new images, and making an eloquent statement about time and change in a small Northeastern city.
128 pages, 77 quadratone illustrations, Hardcover, signed
Price: $55.00
Seacoast Maine
by George Tice
Published by David R. Godine, 2009
For more than five decades, George Tice has been photographing the landscape of America, and a number of his images have become icons of their time and field. But no other state has held for him the particular affection of Maine — its rockbound coastline, its precarious and isolated islands, its independent and hardworking people. And unmistakably, there is the sense of coming from almost another time and place, and, in the last decade or so, of a landscape transforming itself all too quickly into the conventional palette of the twenty-first century — of its fast-food predictabilities, strip mall excrecences, and the anonymous tangles of the internet highway.
This book makes its focus the Maine we all want to remember and the coastline we perhaps visited at one time and grew to love. Tice, for the past five years, has concentrated on assembling and arranging his favorite photographs. The result is comparable in its scope to Szarkowski’s portrait of Minnesota and in sympathy to Evans’ elegy to Alabama. In all, 107 quadtone photographs, from the fogs off Eastport to the lobster boats off Monhegan, from the grain elevators of Portland to the Shakers of Sabbathday Lake. The emphasis is on the coast, on its ports, its people, its geography, and its architecture. And this seems excusable: for most of us, Maine is its coast. It predominates in our mind’s eye, in the popular imagination, and in the images featured in this book.
Still, the real rationale of a book like this is to validate the vision and the work of an artist, and this ambition is more than justified by page after page of dauntingly beautiful images, carefully arranged and faultlessly printed. If Maine is a state you hold dear, this is a book that says it all.
144 pages, 107 quadtone illustrations, Hardcover, signed
Price: $45.00
Selected Photographs, 1953-1999
by George Tice
Published by David R. Godine, 2001
No photographer published in recent years deserves more exposure or more acclaim than George Tice. He has the sensibilities of an urban romantic, and his work ranges from the resolutely rural to haunting still lives of an urban and suburban America whose tableaux of decay and casual abandonment, of genuinely majestic contradictions, reveal a country in the throes of change and yet somehow still clinging to an idealized past.
Tice is unusual, perhaps unique, in his affection for the forms that define our landscapes, and for his uncanny eye – as sensitive as Walker Evans’, as precise as Eugene Atget’s – for capturing images that are at once immediate and timeless, simultaneously modern and classic. This is his own selection of his best images, a striking collection from five decades of consistently outstanding work.
96 pages, 75 duotones, Softcover, first edition, signed
Price: $20.00
Urban Landscapes
by George Tice
Published by W.W. Norton & Company, 2002
The photographs of George Tice combine an appreciation of beauty with the grittiness of ordinary experience. Tice, the photographer/author of books like Hometowns: An American Pilgrimage, Fields of Peace, and the award-winning Paterson, has turned his camera many times to his native New Jersey. But these images of his home state, taken over the past thirty years, could be almost anywhere in America. They portray the movie theaters, shops, dwellings, and street scenes we have grown up with in cities large and small. Without the slightest effort to romanticize, Tice honors the commonplace with an extraordinary eye and a photographic excellence that is evocative to those of us who have experienced these settings. These pictures will stand the test of time as monuments to the American scene for future generations.