DeCordova Collects Photographs: Recent Acquisitions
George Tice
George Tice was born to a family of itinerant peddlers and spent much of his youth on the road. He began taking pictures as a child, using a Baby Brownie to make portraits of friends and family. He joined the navy at seventeen and worked in the photography department taking publicity shots. One of his most significant photographs, of an explosion aboard an aircraft carrier, was taken during this period; the image was acquired by Edward Steichen for the photography collection of the Museum of Modern Art. The photographs for Stone Walls, Grey Skies resulted from a joint fellowship Tice received from the National Museum of Photography, Film, and Television and Bradford and Ilkley College in Yorkshire countryside. The Yorkshire photographs are similar to those in some of his other projects, including Hometowns: An American Pilgrimage, in which Tice photographed the hometowns of James Dean, Ronald Reagan, and Mark Twain, and Seacoast Maine, a collaborative effort that combined photographs with text Tice’s peripatetic childhood clearly affected his photographic approach; much of his artistic work has a descriptive, essay-like feeling. His work, which is dominated by sharp lines and careful construction, incorporates the narrative sense of his subjects and scenes.
