George Tice
White Castle, Route #1, Rahway, New Jersey
1972
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George Tice
White Castle, Route #1, Rahway, New Jersey
1972
Physical Qualities
Gelatin silver print, Sheet: 406 x 508 mm. (16 x 20 in.)
Credit Line
Gift of Nancy and Tom O'Neil, Baltimore
Object Number
2013.349
Although he has produced photographic series on the Pennsylvania Amish and the Maine seacoast, George Tice is best known for his images of commercial and industrial structures that mark the small towns and suburban communities of his native New Jersey. In pictures absent the human figure, the artist isolates examples of mundane East Coast architecture of the mid-20th century and transforms them into icons of contemporary life. Tice’s nighttime image of a White Castle fast-food restaurant features a tidy and small, but strangely regal, glowing structure that contrasts with a dark jumble of empty crates in the foreground. The building seems a beacon along the American roadway and a quirky, antiseptic New World counterpart to the romantic European castles of a past age. Similarly, Rahway, New Jersey’s water tower rises behind a bare tree, an undeniably dominating and odd presence in the midst of an otherwise anonymous landscape.
The Baltimore Museum of Art by gift, 2013; Tom and Nancy O'Neil, Baltimore, by purchase, 2004; Afterimage Gallery, Dallas
New Arrivals: Photographs from the O'Neil Collection
