The pocket paragon series was formulated to highlight the work of talented graphic artists in affordable (and elegant) editions. No photographer we have published in recent years deserves more exposure or more acclaim than George Tice. He has the sensibilities of an urban romantic (the title of one of his books) and his work ranges from the resolutely rural (the Amish still clinging to a lifestyle that has all but vanished in modern times) to haunting still lives of an urban and suburban America whose tableaux of decay and casual abandonment, of genuinely majestic contradictions (the massive water tower of Rahway rising incongruously behind a hoary oak) present an America in the throes of change and yet somehow still clinging to a idealized past.

Tice is unusual, perhaps unique, in his affection for the forms that define our landscapes, and for his uncanny eye, as sensitive as Evans's, as precise as Atget's, for capturing images that are at once immediate and timeless, simultaneously modern and classic. This is his own selection of his best images, a striking collection of four decades of consistently outstanding work.

George Tice's images are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. Author of eleven books, he makes his home in Iselin, New Jersey.