Timeless photos
“I think all of my books of place,” George Tice tells me, “all have the atmosphere of that place…it’s one thing you can do with photography-capturing the atmosphere.” In this latest of his books about place, from the fogs of Lubec to the lobster boats off Monhegan, from the grain elevators of Portland to the Shakers of Sabbathday Lake, the emphasis is on the coast of Maine, its ports, its people, its geography, its architecture. In an interview with the photographer John Paul Caponigro, Tice noted, “Documenting the place is principally what I do…I would say the Urban Landscape work is what is most distinctive about me.”
A tenth-generation New Jerseyite, Tice has been photographing in black and white for over 40 years. Seacoast covers a period from 1970 to 2007, using four different kinds of cameras-view cameras of varying sizes, a twin lens reflex, some 35-millimeter. When I ask if he ever uses a digital camera, I can detect the disgust in his voice: “Digital cameras…well…it makes everyone a photographer…not for me!”
And, in this age of instant everything, Tice does all his own darkroom work. “That’s the master class I teach at the Maine Media workshops in Rockport for 33-34 years now. It’s called ‘The Master Print Photographer.'”
In his Introduction to this movingly crafted book, John K. Hanson (publisher of Maine Boats, Homes & Harbors magazine) writes that Tice’s photographs “project a stillness…they inform the details of life…not with the morbid fascination often seen in the work of other contemporary photographers, but with a more sympathetic ‘you are there’ point of view…It was his early photographs of Maine that helped establish my personal mythology of the state, my understanding of life on the coast, my sense of place, they helped form my lasting image of Maine’s immediate past.”
Just flipping the pages, with long pauses, a reader is amazed at the most ordinary perspectives one might not think of photographing. Some examples: “Window in Port Clyde, 1971” -a dingy look outward toward a gloomy outside, a barely visible building almost imagined; “Clothesline, Monhegan Island, 1971”-fog, a rocky ledge, the barely visible edge of a seaside dwelling on the left, a clothesline with randomly snapped on clothes pins; “Evening for, Jonesport, 1971”-heavy fog (fog reverberates through the images in this book) -hovering over a field of wildflowers, an almost invisible shack swallowed in the mist; “Interior, Olsen House, Cushing, 1971” -a window stark at the foot of a staircase, wood piled high against the steps; “Bird on Wire, Mt. Desert Island, 2007”-a fogged in village street (or is it just approaching evening?) -houses, telephone lines with a lone tiny bird on the wires.
And then there are the people at work-or at rest at work-and always rock, surging surf, lone trees in desolate empty fields, and always more fog, a talisman of sorts of Maine.
His many books-Paterson, Stone Walls, Gray Skies (using selections from the words of the Brontes); Lincoln (statues of Lincoln from across the country); and more…his reputation amplified in over 80 public collections worldwide.
Now he is working on the Ticetown Project. “The Tices have been here since 1663,” he tells Caponigro. “That was a real surprise to see how American I am and how long my ancestors have been in the same spot which is within 15 miles of where I live today.”
And, too, he is photographing Lincolniana again, heading out west soon, a new book for the bicentennial. “I’m a one-man band,” he tells me, indicating that for the most part he works alone.
For John Hanson, Tice’s imagery speaks of “old-time traditions that helped build the more prosperous Maine of today.” He writes of “the feeling of expectancy” of these photos, the timelessness so evocative as you leaf through the pages, the wordless stories that are told.