GEORGE TICE

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 - and, in the case of the three prints presented here, 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 the experience as “overwhelming in a profoundly subtle way”, a sensibility that would shape his lifelong appreciation of tonal nuance.

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 that Tice described as “magnificent”.

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. The prints presented here represent the fullest expression of that collaboration.