In 1961, photographer George Tice stood above a narrow dirt road in Pennsylvania hoping that an Amish farmer would come along in a horse-drawn buggy to fill the frame.
He waited there with the shutter cocked on his Rolleiflex, and then he waited there some more. As darkness approached, he finally saw something coming, up and over the rise - a Volkswagen Beetle rattling along.
That didn't do much for his project on the Amish so he snapped just one frame, and 52 years later that lonely Bug is image No. 1 in a sequence of 44 vintage black-and-white prints in the exhibition "George Tice: A Photographer's Photographer," at San Francisco's Scott Nichols Gallery.
Featuring work from the 1960s and 1970s, this is one of five simultaneous exhibitions nationwide to celebrate Tice's 75th birthday, on Oct. 13. Three of those shows are in his home state of New Jersey, one is on Madison Avenue in Manhattan. The fifth brings him to 49 Geary to see his work on a San Francisco wall for the first time in a long time.
"I had a show at Focus Gallery. Might have been '71," says Tice in an accent that goes back 10 generations to 1663 in New Amsterdam. He grew up around Newark and is Jersey down to the pack of Winstons in his shirt pocket.
Asked whether he smoked on the flight, he answers: "They don't even let me smoke in the hotel." Mention the location of his famous Beetle photo, in Lancaster, and he corrects the pronunciation to "Lankuhstuh."
Tice was a hungry kid because he and his mother were "travelers," meaning gypsies. They moved around from trailer camp to trailer camp, school to school, until Tice got tired of that and quit after 10th grade.
He didn't need school. He got his education from the Carteret Camera Club, which he joined in 1953 with a "baby Brownie" that cost $2.98.
He was 16 and working as a darkroom assistant in Newark. By 17, he'd gotten all he could out of that and joined the U.S. Navy, talking his way into the photography unit. His break came during an explosion on an aircraft carrier 300 miles at sea. He dashed up to the flight deck and got a shot of sailors pushing burning helicopters overboard that made the cover of the New York Times.
The legendary Edward Steichen, who ran the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, bought a print. "So there I was at 20, in an important museum collection," Tice says in a flat tone to indicate that it was no big deal.
No big deal, either, that he was standing in the MoMA photo gallery, flicking ashes into a stand-up tray being shared by Walker Evans, the premier American documentarian of the 20th century.
"I asked him about a few of his pictures," Tice recalls.
Ask Tice who his mentors and contemporaries were and you expect to hear the names of the greats - Steichen, Evans, Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander. His answer: "The people in the camera club in Carteret, New Jersey," he says, pronouncing it "Caughtera." Is he the most famous member? "Well, I became well-known in the camera club."
His style is not strictly documentary because he uses long exposures and is after a mood more than a moment. But it is not portraiture and it is not nature. Ken Light, photography professor at UC Berkeley, describes it as "documentary fine art photography."
"Ansel Adams was known for his craft but he didn't respond to the world around him," says Light, who hosted Tice for a recent lecture at Northgate Hall, the Graduate School of Journalism. "George was able to take the craft and apply it to the social landscape in New Jersey. Things like the White Castle that most people would just walk by."
Standing before that image, taken in 1973, the "photographer's photographer" can still feel the pull of the White Castle on Route 1 in Rahway.
"Ten hamburgers for a dollar," he says.
George Tice: A Photographer's Photographer: Through Nov. 30. Scott Nichols Gallery, 49 Geary St, S.F. (415) 788-4641. www.scottnicholsgallery.com.
Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: swhiting@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @samwhitingsf
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