Tag: dream

Alice Rose George, Mississippi-born poet, curator, and photo editor, an ardent promoter of famous and unsung photographers for over 50 years, and whose unfailing eye for visual detail has made her a staple in the New York magazine world , died on Dec. 12, 22 in Los Angeles. She was 76 years old.

His partner, Jim Belson, said the cause was a concussion.

Spiritual and urban with a love for whiskey and a touch of the South, Mrs. George, known to friends as Pi, has cultivated relationships with numerous photographers and collectors, gallery owners and magazine editors, helping to weaving a community just as the very nature of photography was undergoing rapid changes, including new directions in photojournalism and the efflorescence of fine art photography.

From her first job as an assistant photo editor at Time magazine in the late 1960s, Ms. George used the demise of the old order of photo magazines like Life and Look to promote a more style of photojournalism. personal and committed. , an analogue of the emerging vogue around the very personal and deeply immersive new journalism of the day.

At the time, galleries and collectors specializing in photography did not yet exist, and artistic-minded photographers struggled to get by. Ms George, who went on to work in magazines like GEO, Fortune, Details and Granta, will use her vast photo budgets to commission promising young artists like Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Joel Sternfeld, giving them work that not only provided them with a check. payroll, but opportunities to build portfolios.

“She was a photographer’s dream editor,” said Susan Meiselas, a photographer who worked under Ms. George in the early 1990s when Ms. George ran the New York offices of Magnum photo agency. “She saw what they saw and gave them support, not only financial but emotional.”

Ms. George had no training in photography or art. She graduated in English at university and considered herself primarily a poet; she publishes regularly in magazines such as The Paris Review and The Atlantic. She came to photo editing instinctively, with a deep love for images and the people who made them, especially young photographers who had yet to leave their mark.

“She didn’t just put you in touch,” said Lisa Kereszi, who was a young photographer when she met Ms. George in 1997 and now teaches at Yale, by phone, “she cultivated you by finding out who you were. . a photographer.”

Alice Rose George was born on October 23, 1944 in Silver Creek, Mississippi, about an hour south of Jackson. His mother, Louise (Fairman) George, was a housewife. His father, James George, was a farmer. He nicknamed Alice “Apple Pie”, which he later abbreviated as Pie; she dropped the “e”.

Ms. George moved to New Orleans in 1962 to study English Literature at H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College, the all-female branch of Tulane University. Graduating in 1966, she immediately left for New York, where she dreamed of living since she was a child.

She made her home at 1 Fifth Avenue, a massive apartment building overlooking Manhattan’s Washington Square Park, in a tiny apartment that became her home for the rest of her life. Guests were often forced to eat at her kitchen counter because her dining table was filled with heavy photo books, as were her chairs, shelves and everything in between – except her piano (she had a classical background ).

After working in magazines for almost 30 years, including a brief stint in London as editor of Granta, Ms George became independent. She was busier than ever. She has organized exhibitions, authored or co-authored five books, and started a lucrative business consulting high net worth individuals as well as businesses on their art collections. For more than a decade starting in the 1990s, she helped Howard Stein, President and CEO of the Dreyfus Corporation, build what many consider to be the largest private collection of photographs in the country.

She has also written two books of poetry, “Ceiling of the World” (1995) and “Two Eyes” (2015); taught at the University of Hartford, Connecticut, in its Master of Fine Arts program; and even had a watercress potato salad recipe published in The New York Times.

Ms George met her partner Mr Belson in the 1970s, but they wouldn’t start dating for about 30 years. At the time, he had a home in Los Angeles, and in recent years they have alternated between the two coasts until the pandemic persuaded them to live most of last year in California. She died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

Besides Mr. Belson, she is survived by her sister, Jane Tyrone. Her brother, James, died in 2002.

Ms George was in Portugal when terrorists attacked the United States on September 11, 2001 and it took her a week to return to New York. When she did, she partnered up with artist Michael Shulan and photographers Gilles Peress and Charles Traub, who were developing a fleeting photo gallery idea to reflect on the attacks. Professional and amateur photographers would submit images, which they would print and hang in a SoHo storefront, then sell them to raise money for charity.

Building on her connections, Ms. George quickly raised enough money to get the project started, and less than two weeks later, “Here Is New York: A Democracy of Photographs” had opened. It was a huge success: over the next year, some 1.5 million people passed through the gallery and purchased 40,000 prints. Some of the images were featured in a photo book edited by Mrs. George and Mr. Peress.

It was, Mr Peress said in an interview, a crowning experience for her, allowing her to deploy her skills both as a writer and as a photo editor, and to show how words and images can complement each other to communicate something deeper than one or the other. could on their own.

“Alice was very alive, very present in the world,” he says. “For her, there was a direct link between poetry and images.