His work depicts a broad range of American life, landscape, and urban environment, mostly photographed in his native New Jersey.
[11] In 1955, he attended the Newark Vocational and Technical High School, where he briefly studied commercial photography under Harve Wobbe.
[10] After boot camp and two years at Naval Air Station Memphis, he was transferred to sea duty aboard the aircraft carrier, USS Wasp.
That same year, he began to make short trips to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, to photograph the Amish and Mennonite communities, using 35mm and medium format cameras.
In 1964, he began his series of tree photographs and ended his association with the Vailsburg Camera Club, believing that he had learned all he could from its members.
Since William Willis' patents insufficiently described the paper used for printing, Tice reinvented the process and detailed his efforts in a 1970 issue of the British photography journal Album.
[14] In 1972, Tice continued to experiment with early photographic processes by printing a photogenic drawing of leaves in a contact frame exposed to sunlight onto hand-sensitized paper coated with diluted silver nitrate, resembling Henry Fox Talbot's Calotype negatives.
In 1970, Doubleday published Tice's first book, Fields of Peace: A Pennsylvania German Album, with text by Millen Brand.
That year, he photographed coastal Maine, taught at The New School for Social Research, and traveled to London and Paris with Lee Witkin.
Together, they met with Frederick H. Evans' son, who sold them a block of platinum prints and lantern slides for the Witkin Gallery.
Tice also made prints of photographs by Frederick H. Evans, Francis Bruguière, and Edward Weston, which were issued by the Witkin Gallery.
[15] Ansel Adams recommended Tice for a commission by the Field Museum of Natural History to make a pair of 60-foot (18 m) murals of Sapelo Island.
Around 1976/77, Tice acquired a Fujica soft-focus lens, which he used over the next two years for a series of photographs of a girlfriend, Deborah, and three white cats, one of which belonged to his daughters.
Whereas modern photographers treated soft focus as a flaw producing cloudy glows, Tice praised the effect as one lost along the history of photography.
As in Paterson, Tice explored scenes of the working man's environment that survived only precariously at the time, soon to disappear forever.
In 1977, Tice produced Artie Van Blarcum: An Extended Portrait, documenting the life of a Tri-County Camera Club member.
Tice used Blarcum's amateur photography to critique art that intends to suit the tastes of competition judges by perfecting one's technique on banal subject matter.
In 1983, he traveled to the Midwest to photograph the hometowns of legendary American men: James Dean's Fairmount, Indiana, Ronald Reagan's Dixon, Illinois, and Mark Twain's Hannibal, Missouri.
The following year, Tice and Cole Weston led a group of American photographers on a cultural exchange program to the Soviet Union.
The following year, they published the work he did as a fellow, Stone Walls, Grey Skies: A Vision of Yorkshire, consisting of moody, atmospheric views of the countryside and coast.
In 2002, W. W. Norton published George Tice: Urban Landscapes with introduction by Brian Wallis, accompanied by an exhibition of the same title at the International Center of Photography.
That year, Tice traveled to London, Yorkshire, and Belgium, where he oversaw the production of Common Mementoes, a collection of previously unpublished urban landscapes from the 1990s.
Tice contributed to the group show at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Where We Live, Photographs of America, from the Berman Collection.
A resident of Middletown Township, New Jersey, Tice died there from complications of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease on January 16, 2025, at the age of 86.