Photographs project sense of lost America

GEORGE TICE: URBAN LANDSCAPES, through Saturday at the University of Maine Museum of Art, Bangor, 561-3350.

In this corner of the country, the urban landscape isn’t something we see every day. There are no skyscrapers in Bangor, or even Portland, and we have a whopping two sets of escalators in town. So when I walked into the George Tice show at the University of Maine Museum of Art, I expected to find the exotic, in the form of pavement and steel and glass – the same way people from away come to Maine to see trees and mountains and the ocean.

Instead, I found images that were comforting and familiar. This show spans the career of Tice, a photographic master, from the early 1970s to 1999. In poetic black and white, he documents the forces of time – through change and stasis – in his native New Jersey.

There is a strong sense of place, to be certain, but at the same time, more than one image could have been mistaken for downtown Bangor, or a water tower in Hermon, or a gas station in Ellsworth. By capturing his hometown landscape, Tice has, in a sense, captured the history of America in small vignettes – a shiny home bar in a suburban basement, the neon-lit facade of a diner.

In some cases, he returns to the scene decades later, to find a luxury hotel in place of a neighborhood eatery, and the sense of loss is profound. Change is inevitable, and through Tice’s lens, we see what is gained, and what is lost.

He finds beauty in the mundane – a water tower, hovering over a gas station at twilight like a spaceship about to land, a White Castle hamburger joint rising from a bed of concrete, its faux turrets looking oddly regal in black and white.

Tice’s work awakens possibility in the world we see, too – he makes us realize that time is fleeting. Though it may take a little more time here, the landscape around us is slowly, irrevocably changing, and photographs such as these cause us to notice things that we’d normally overlook – a McDonald’s, a diner, a basement rec room – and find beauty in them as well.