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Remembering George Tice
3 February 2025
George Tice, the "Bard of New Jersey" died in January at his New Jersey home from complications of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He was 86.
He born in Newark to parents who divorced when he was very young. His mother, an Irish Traveller who raised him, peddled Irish linens door to door, living in trailer parks in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Florida before she remarried.
Tice, who peddled crepe paper roses until he was 16, got into photography as a teen, inspired by his father's amateur albums. "He could show with 12 albums his whole life, from the time he was born until his death," he said in admiration.
He visited his father regularly until his death when Tice was 19.
In 1953, Trice traded his Kodak Brownie for a 35mm Kodak Pony and turned the family trailer into a darkroom. He joined a camera club in Carteret, N.J., where he won second prize in a black-and-white competition with his photographs of the down-and-out in the Bowery. He also worked as a darkroom assistant at Classic Photo after leaving school at the age of 16.
When he was 17, he joined the Navy and was sent or training in a photo lab before being assigned to the carrier USS Wasp. In 1959, he photographed sailor extinguishing a burning helicopter aboard the Wasp at sea. The image, which ran on the front page of the New York Times, caught the attention of Edward Steichen of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. At the age of 20, after an honorable discharge from the Navy, his career was born.
For the next decade, he worked as a portrait photographer, helping to establish The Witkin Gallery. In the 1960s, he switched from smaller camera formats to larger ones, focusing his lens on urban and rural landscapes. He taught himself how to use a view camera. And began photographing the Amish and Mennonite communities in Lancaster, Pa., over eight years before shooting architectural and industrial motifs that identified America to him. The projects became books.
Tice made a living selling prints and his books, including Fields of Peace: A Pennsylvania German Album (1970), mostly about the Amish and Mennonites; Lincoln (1984), in 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 trip to England.
His photographs are in the collections of many museums. He was granted fellowships in 1973 from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. George Tice: Seeing Beyond the Moment (2013), directed by Bruce Wodder, documented his life.
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.