In Paterson II, George Tice returns to Paterson, New Jersey, the city that helped initiate his sustained photographic study of his home state’s vernacular architecture. The book gathers 77 quadratone photographs, including dozens of new images, to consider what becomes visible when a photographer revisits a familiar place after the passage of time. Storefronts, commercial structures, and other ordinary elements of the built environment become evidence of continuity and alteration in a small Northeastern city.

Tice’s approach is rooted in specificity. Paterson is not presented as an interchangeable emblem of urban America, but as a particular place whose identity resides in its everyday architecture. By returning to the same source of inspiration, he makes the elapsed years part of the subject: buildings and streets register change, while the persistence of his attention provides a stable point from which to read it.

The project also occupies a distinct position within Tice’s longer engagement with New Jersey. A tenth-generation native of the state, he began a thirty-year documentation of its vernacular architecture with his Paterson work in 1972; that earlier work was included in his solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Paterson II therefore functions both as an independent portrait of the city and as a later chapter in an extended regional study.

Published by Quantuck Lane in 2006, the 128-page hardcover gives this return a concentrated book form. Its significance for a serious photography collection lies in the connection it establishes between an early, publicly established phase of Tice’s work and his subsequent reconsideration of the same city. More than a survey of local architecture, it offers a defined comparison across decades within one photographer’s sustained practice, showing how place, time, and repeated observation can structure a body of work.