Before there was “Weird New Jersey,” before Bruce Springsteen rhapsodized about tacky shore towns, before painters celebrated the bleak grandeur of the New Jersey Turnpike, before Kevin Smith’s “Clerks” and “The Sopranos,” there was George Tice.
A watertower looms over a Cherry Hill gas station in George Tice’s photograph.
The Newark-born photographer fell in love with the funky poetry of New Jersey’s urban and industrial landscapes way back in the mid-Sixties. He wasn’t the first photographer to take an interest in such subject matter. Before him there had been Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and others. But Tice was unique in celebrating the gritty and mundane charm of a single state, and so his work becomes a place portrait, as well.
In 1975, Tice published his photographs of New Jersey in a book titled “Urban Landscapes.” The current show at the International Center of Photography, accompanied by a second edition of the book, carries the series to what Tice felt should be its turn-of-the-century conclusion.
Tice rarely sensationalizes. There is an ordinariness, a matter-of-factness to his black and white prints of gas stations, diners, luncheonettes, storefronts, and industrial scenes. Roadside oddities such as a diner in the shape of a castle are staple Americana nowadays, but Tice coaxed something extra out of his 1973 photo of a White Castle diner on Route 1 in Rahway. The tiny building is all lit up in the dark, and Tice has positioned his camera in the rear by the “employees only” door and the scattering of wire milk crates, mundane features that contrast with the fake turrets and castle crenellation. The point of view foreshortens the building and exaggerates its smallness so that it looks like something made of Lego blocks.
Another beacon in the night is the Cherry Hill gas station. The brightly lit pump islands draw our attention away from something looming in the darkness above, a 12-legged water tower, looking as if it just stepped out of “War of the Worlds.” In the same genre is — or perhaps this one is more mystery than sci-fi — a phone booth at the side of a nowhere road in Rahway. It is empty but bright as a lighthouse, leaning a bit back in the uncut weeds and framed by a utility pole and its slanting guy wire.
Tice uses an 8-by-10 camera, which yields an incredible amount of detail, especially in the daytime scenes. You can see a wad of gum on a sidewalk from 100 paces or check the tread on the tires of a UPS truck from across the street. In the heap of rotted timbers on the Jersey City waterfront, you can see the peeling layers of plywood, the exaggerated grain of waterlogged wood, every splinter. Like Evans, Tice made myopia a virtue, finding a world of visual interest in the ugliest subjects.
Even the plaster remnants of a demolished Newark building that remain stuck to the wall of its still-standing neighbor are found to have an interesting abstract pattern — the imprint of stairways and walls makes a bold pattern of stripes and diagonals. But Tice is too much the antiquarian to remain focused on decay. His mundane buildings generally have their hair combed, their top button buttoned, and, thanks to the 8-by-10 — which corrects for the convergence of lines that you get with smaller cameras — their vertical lines kept parallel to the sides of the print. People occasionally intrude, but their presence is kept to a minimum. Even when he photographed Seaside Heights, he picked a cool day in June, so as to give more prominence to the physical features of the boardwalk.
While the diner subject has been exploited to the point of over-familiarity, Tice has little competition in his celebration of a similar subject, the urban luncheonette. In “Monument Sweet Shop, New Brunswick,” he plays with rectangles: the checkerboard tile pattern framing the squarish windows, the “luncheonette” sign, even the less prominent rectangles of the sidewalk blocks and the steel door entrance to the basement. He also likes the interiors, the old soda fountains with their marble counters, big coffee urns, milkshake blenders, and syrup squirters. An air of nostalgia wafts through this show as it advances into the Eighties and Nineties. Perhaps the nostalgia was already there. The White Castle diner was, by 1973, already a throwback. But, as the decades march on, there’s a sense of Tice working hard to preserve the world of the Forties and Fifties — that of his own childhood and adolescence — of a camera searching for intact pieces and editing out the rest.
In 1998, he was able to capture a chunk of Newark cityscape in which the old buildings hold center stage — the Military Park Building, the Carlton Hotel, and the gigantic S. Klein (“On the Square”) sign.
Tice loves old signs, such as the fish-shaped one from Camden, the shoe-shaped one from Newark, or the one for the “Moon Motel” in Howell, with its rockets and crescent moon motif.
There is a slight slackening toward the end, a sense that Tice, having staked his territory, felt less a need to craft the images so much as to just present them, like that witless grinning face on the side of the Palace Funhouse in Asbury Park. Or the “original” Manna hamburgers in Jersey City, or the 1996 “Baltimore Grill,” a relic of the old Atlantic City.
But Tice also gives the modern world a fair look, as with the winged “Golden Boy” statue in front of AT&T’s modern headquarters in Basking Ridge, a bizarre semi-mythical figure who holds lightning bolts in one hand and telephone cable in the other. Or, the Coastal Gas Station in Perth Amboy with its gigantic marquee-like roof over the pump island, or the Jetsons-style modernism of a drive-in bank in Caldwell, which looks like it might fly off on its wavy wings.
They lack the venerable nobility of the older motifs, but there’s something refreshing in the discovery that, when it comes to flash, funk, and weirdness, New Jersey is still up to the challenge.
International Center of Photography, NYC
2002
