George Tice and Salto Ulbeek
George Tice (1938 - 2025), American photographer born in New Jersey, is widely regarded as one of the foremost fine-art photographers of his generation. Throughout his career, he remained deeply attentive to the American urban and rural landscape, and to what he described as “the vestiges of a culture on the verge of extinction”.
Gifted with a rare sensitivity, Tice observed the textures of everyday life and the quiet presence of ordinary things. He was drawn to the specificity of place - the tangible, the immediate, the lived. The images in his “American Beauty” depict the familiar fabric of American life - cinemas, storefronts, homes, streets, the automobile. Without embellishment or sentimentality, Tice endowed the commonplace with a quiet dignity, guided by a discerning eye.
His masterful command of photographic language earned him fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and brought his work into over a hundred museum collections, including MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the J. Paul Getty Museum.
Tice first encountered platinum-palladium printing in the 1960s, when visiting an exhibition of the British photographer Frederick H. Evans at MoMA. He described this transformation experience:
“In the late 60s, I saw a small exhibition of platinum prints by the British photographer Frederick H. Evans, (1853-1943) at New York's Museum of Modern Art. These were the first platinum prints I had ever seen. The experience was overwhelming in a profoundly subtle way. The first print I looked at was "Lincoln Cathedral: From the Castle, 1898”. This is a photograph of village rooftops with smoke rising from chimneys and above the village are the three gothic towers of the cathedral. The image fills the frame. I could see it was a great photograph - a masterwork. And the print was unlike any I had seen before. They didn't look like the silver prints I had been making. They were on plain matte paper without gloss or emulsion to interfere with the viewing experience. I had the feeling that I could step right into his pictures and walk around. Both the image and the quality of the print had an intense, ethereal effect on me. If there are any images by others that have informed my vision and craft - "Lincoln Cathedral" is the one! I believe the memory of it flashed through my mind the night I made "Petit's Mobil Station”. - George Tice
The collaboration between George Tice and Georges Charlier, founder of Salto Ulbeek, began in 2006, when Charlier invited him to bring the original large-format negative of his celebrated image “Petit’s Mobil Station” to Belgium. Drawing on his expertise and experimentation with the medium, Charlier produced a large-format platinum print and the two men continued their collaboration, producing a series of platinum-palladium prints as well as a folio “American Beauty”, comprising twenty four platinum-palladium prints on Gampi paper.
Tice wrote of the meeting with Salto Ulbeek: “In 2006, on a trip to Belgium where my book Common Mementos was being printed by Salto Ulbeek, I met the firm: Georges Charlier, Nadia Werckx and William Ingram. Georges wears many hats, but when it comes to printing he stands far above his contemporaries. They print photography books in 600-line screen quadtone that look like facsimiles of the original. At his atelier, a former brewery he is restoring in Ulbeek, they make platinum prints as big as 28" x 36". He suggested on my next trip to Belgium that I bring the original negative of "Petit's Mobil Station”, with me and he would make a large print gratis. He wanted to show me what he could do with one of my negatives and that I might consider other possibilities for my work. The print was magnificent. Salto Ulbeek has now published nine of my photographs in small editions. And Prestige Art Limited published another nine printed by Salto Ulbeek. In addition to Common Mementos Salto Ulbeek has printed two other books of mine: Paterson II and Ticetown.”
We are able to offer a very limited number of signed prints from this collaboration with George Tice. Three will be on show at Photo London 2026.
All images ©George Tice/Salto Ulbeek
