On Aug. 18, 1959, George Tice was a Navy photographer’s mate third class on the plane provider Wasp when an explosion in a hangar bay rocked the ship within the Atlantic Ocean, about 250 miles from Norfolk, Va.
He rushed to the flight deck, digicam in hand, and took photos of sailors extinguishing a fireplace in a helicopter earlier than they pushed it overboard. The Navy stated the accident was brought about when one helicopter engine “overspeeded” and exploded throughout testing, consuming it and two different helicopters in flames. Two males died and 21 had been injured.
Considered one of Mr. Tice’s dramatic photos of the scene was syndicated by The Related Press and ran on the entrance web page of The New York Instances. It was observed by the famend photographer Edward Steichen, then the director of the pictures division on the Museum of Fashionable Artwork in New York, who requested the Navy for a print for its assortment.
Broad recognition for his artistry — his work can be in comparison with Walker Evans’s documentary images and the city realism of Edward Hopper’s work — wouldn’t come for some time. After being discharged from the Navy, Mr. Tice grew to become a portrait photographer of kids and households.
On the facet, although, he had begun spending time in Paterson, N.J., a down-at-the-heels industrial metropolis, the place he discovered magnificence within the prosaic: A barbershop with a person behind its window, ready to snip. The Passaic Falls. A automobile on the market in a driveway. Rooftops.
Mr. Tice was interested in Paterson as a topic after he stood on Garret Mountain, which rises above town out of parkland. From there, Paterson appeared like a “miniature mannequin of a metropolis,” he instructed The Instances in 2002. “It’s remoted — the mountain on one facet, the Passaic River on the opposite facet. It’s all enclosed. It’s a spot unto itself.”
He was capable of go away portrait pictures in 1970, when his prints of Paterson and the folks of Amish nation in Lancaster County, Pa., the place he had additionally moonlighted, started to promote on the Witkin Gallery in Manhattan, which he helped set up.
His status rapidly grew, together with his images showing in magazines and in exhibitions across the nation. His Paterson images had been proven on the New Jersey Historic Society in Newark in 1971 and had been then the topic of a solo exhibition on the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork a yr later. The photographs had been additionally reproduced that yr in a guide, “Paterson.”
Over the following half century, Mr. Tice got here to be seen as a photographic bard of New Jersey, touring the state together with his cumbersome 8×10 view digicam and capturing items of its city panorama. These included a telephone sales space in Rahway, lit up at 3 a.m. however shrouded in darkness; a White Citadel, additionally in Rahway, captured from the again at evening and searching like a desolate little burger outpost; and, in his most well-known photograph, additionally taken at evening, a Mobil station in Cherry Hill with an enormous water tower looming within the background like an alien spaceship.
“Now 42, Mr. Tice has performed a lot of his biggest work in New Jersey that he has turn out to be a metaphor for the state — a photographic equal of William Carlos Williams,” Vivien Raynor wrote in her Instances assessment of an exhibition of Mr. Tice’s work on the Woodman Gallery in Middletown, N.J., in 1981.
Mr. Tice lived in Middletown, and he died there, at his house, on Jan. 16 at 86. His daughter Jennifer Tice-Spagnoli stated the trigger was issues of continual obstructive pulmonary illness.
Till a couple of days earlier than he died, Mr. Tice, who was a grasp printer, was nonetheless hoping to revise his guide “Lifework” (2022), a profession retrospective.
“He took me apart,” Ms. Tice-Spagnoli stated, “and he stated, ‘I wish to have a look at my guide yet another time.’ He was nonetheless critiquing it, and he wished to excellent it.”
It was typical of his darkroom work ethic.
“He by no means gave up,” his daughter stated in an interview. “I’d be within the darkroom with him, and we’d consider an image, and he’d say, ‘I believe we have to make a couple of modifications,’ and we might, and I’d suppose it was good, however he’d say, ‘No,’ and we’d do it time and again.”
George Andrew Tice was born on Oct. 13, 1938, in Newark. His dad and mom divorced when he was very younger, and he was raised by his mom, Margaret (Robertson) Tice, a member of the Irish Travelers ethnic neighborhood. His mom peddled Irish linens door to door, and the household lived largely in trailer parks, in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Florida. She later remarried.
From age 6 to age 16, George offered crepe paper roses, each on his personal and with family.
His father, William Tice, was an insurance coverage underwriter. He was additionally an novice photographer, and his albums ignited George’s ardour for storytelling by way of pictures.
“He may present with 12 albums his complete life, from the time he was born till his dying,” Mr. Tice stated in an interview with the visible artist John Paul Caponigro in 1996 for View Digicam journal. “I assumed that was an unimaginable factor.”
As a teen, George traded up from a Kodak Brownie digicam to a 35-millimeter Kodak Pony; joined a digicam membership in Carteret, N.J., the place he impressed the opposite members, all of them grownup males; turned his household’s trailer right into a darkroom, to the chagrin of his stepfather, John Hahn; photographed downtrodden males on the Bowery in Manhattan; and labored as a darkroom assistant at a photograph studio.
At 17, he joined the Navy He was despatched for coaching in a photograph lab earlier than being assigned to the provider Wasp.
The photograph of the Wasp explosion’s aftermath — a body filled with frantic sailors within the throes of an emergency — can be an uncommon entry in Mr. Tice’s oeuvre; folks don’t seem in most of his images from New Jersey and past. There have been exceptions, although: Amish boys wearing black and enjoying within the snow; a bit boy standing on a nook in Tallinn, Estonia, wanting cautious as a person in a cap approaches him; a pair on their houseboat in Jersey Metropolis.
Mr. Tice made his dwelling by promoting prints and his many books, together with “Fields of Peace: A Pennsylvania German Album” (1970), principally concerning the Amish and Mennonites; “Lincoln” (1984), a homage for which he photographed statues of the sixteenth president and motels, vehicles and different objects named for him; and “Stone Partitions, Gray Skies: A Imaginative and prescient of Yorkshire” (1993), documenting a sojourn in England.
“That I’d do a Lincoln guide didn’t happen to me till the evening I came across the Lincoln Motel and Abe’s Disco,” Mr. Tice instructed The Central New Jersey House Information in 1984. “There he was, proper within the coronary heart of Newark, all lit up in neon and flashing lights. My mission was clear; I’d journey America searching for Lincoln.”
Along with Ms. Tice-Spagnoli, he’s survived by three different daughters, Loretta and Lisa Tice and Lynn Mesler, all from his marriage to Marie Tremmel, which resulted in divorce; a son, Christopher, from his marriage to Joanna Blaylock, which additionally resulted in divorce; three half brothers, Jack and Robert Hahn and Glenn Tice; 9 grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren. A 3rd marriage additionally resulted in divorce.
Mr. Tice, whose images are within the collections of many museums, acquired fellowships in 1973 from the Guggenheim Basis and the Nationwide Endowment for the Arts. He was the topic of a documentary, “George Tice: Seeing Past the Second” (2013), directed by Bruce Wodder.
In that movie, Mr. Tice described his emphasis on the mundane relatively than the spectacular in his pictures.
“The everydayness of life will get in the way in which of the everlasting,” he stated. “I ponder how this {photograph} will probably be seen sooner or later, when the subject material not endures.
“Taking an image is, certainly, stopping the world.”