Galleries: George Tice's iconic photographs on display at Berman Museum of Art

The photographer George Tice has a long-running romance with his home state of New Jersey. It shines through in his large platinum prints of ordinary small-town fixtures: a movie theater, a White Tower hamburger joint, the well-stocked shelves of an old-fashioned grocery. His much-admired nocturnal images of a gas station (Petit's Mobil Station, Cherry Hill, NJ, 1974) and a lonely telephone booth (Telephone Booth, 3 A.M. Rahway, NJ, 1974) are of fluorescently lighted places we've all passed and barely noticed while driving at night, but Tice's still versions of them, shot with long exposures, transform them into glowing, mysterious beauties.

Those prints and a number of lesser-known silver gelatin prints, all of which have been published in books, can now be seen in "George Tice: Seldom Seen and Big Platinums," at the Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College. Curated by the Berman's director, Charles Stainback, the exhibition also includes photographs taken by Tice while working on various series in Illinois, New York, and Missouri, and George Tice: Seeing Beyond the Moment, a continuously playing documentary about the now-77-year-old photographer, made in 2014 by Peter Bosco, Bruce Wodder, and Douglas Underdahl.

Tice, whose ancestors arrived in New Amsterdam in 1663 and gravitated to Morris County, N.J., in 1709, was born in Newark, N.J., in 1938. He began taking pictures when he was 14, as a member of the Carteret Camera Club. At 16, he dropped out of school and went to work as a darkroom assistant in a Newark portrait studio. A year later, he joined the Navy. Serious recognition of his talent soon followed, when his photograph of an explosion on the USS Wasp was purchased by Edward Steichen for the Museum of Modern Art. Following his release from the Navy, Tice supported himself as a home portrait photographer, and it was not until the 1970s that he was able to concentrate on his own work. Since then, 17 books of his photographs have been published.

Tice's iconic images stand out, not because they're familiar (I recognized only three of them) or larger than his lesser-known pictures, but because they hone in on and isolate their subjects much the way portraits of human subjects do, drawing attention to their myriad details, while also conferring a sense of grandeur to the everyday.

The first time I tried to go to CRUXspace, a "new-media" gallery, on a Saturday afternoon, I couldn't find it. A helpful neighbor, sitting on a stoop nearby, pointed out the building, adding, "It's not open."

The second time I went, again on a Saturday afternoon, the door was locked. I e-mailed the director and owner, Andrew Cameron Zahn, to let him know of my efforts. He had been e-mailing me weekly to see when I would visit. He apologized and said that I'd have to tell him when I would be coming. The chutzpah! What gallery isn't open on a Saturday?

But I was curious about what lay behind that door. The building gave no outward sign of having any sort of business in it. Or any inhabitants. Yet Zahn had posted photos of his openings on his website, and they were clearly well-attended, so something was attracting people to this place.

An appointment was set. Zahn opened the door and welcomed me in.

"Mural Arts Presents: Community Tech," organized for CRUXspace by Brian Campbell and RJ Rushmore of the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, brings together the works of Meg Saligman, Ben Volta, Nadia Hironaka, and Matthew Suib, all of whom have worked with Mural Arts.

Saligman's video installations, and those by Hironaka and Suib, and Volta's collaborative, digitally printed murals look terrific together in this tiny, out-of-the-way gallery, and make one hope Zahn will find a way to stay open at least one day a week.

For now, you'll have to make an appointment.