Geleve Grice: Arkansas Photographer

Abstract

WHO CAN ANTICIPATE VOCATION'S ARRIVAL? A child is at a child's work or play, lost in a wholly engrossing present, unsuspecting. Suddenly, for the fortunate at least, a future knocks. Some feature of the world is seen or heard in sharper light-a horse's injured leg, white bandage incandescent against the dark forelock; a few bars of music from a second story window, a sound so plangent as to seem at first an animal cry; a stuffed wolverine, snarling, furtive, eerily knowing, posed in a museum diorama. Time slows. The moment enlarges. A spirit is claimed. A veterinarian, an alto saxophonist, a wildlife biologist is born. For Geleve Grice, photographer, the earliest calls came twice. He was in Little Rock, a star center on Dunbar High School's football squad. The year was 1940, perhaps 1941. Lifting himself from a muddied field, he glances to the sideline and notes a photographer, warm and dry, wearing a tie, in possession of expensive looking equipment. It is an epiphany of contrasts-in retrospect it seems inevitable that the bruised and smudged youth, rising from the ground, would look up with admiration to the comfortable professional at ease on the sideline. Still earlier, on a downtown city street, he'd watched another photographer at work with a large-format Speed Graphic camera. Nearly sixty years and tens of thousands of photographs later, Grice still remembers the appeal of the equipment, the careful precision of the work, the dapper professionalism of the photographers themselves. The lure was immediate and strong-before he graduated, in 1942, he owned his own camera. But before the photographers and the cameras, before high school, before Little Rock, there was the rural countryside, the seasonal routines of farm work, the memory of mules harnessed for work in early morning light. Geleve Grice was born in 1922, in Tamo, Arkansas, a small farming community in the southeastern comer of Jefferson County, fifteen miles from Pine Bluff. He grew up a farm boy; he was thirteen before his family moved to Little Rock in 1935. From Little Rock he would go on to Chicago. In World War 11 he would serve in the Pacific. In the 1990s, semiretired, he flies to Honolulu every year to visit his brother and take in the Pro Bowl. But in between, for most of his life and for most of his work, he would come home to Jefferson County. The boy may have left the country, but the country stayed with the man. Even now he lists hunting and fishing among his favorite pleasures. Grice graduated from Dunbar High in 1942, making the first team AllState football team in his senior year. War was everywhere then, and the young graduate went straight into the Navy. He ended up in the Pacific in 1944, where his two-year overseas hitch included guard duty supervising Japanese prisoners. But before he shipped out he was stationed at the Great Lakes Training Base in Illinois, where he played football and put his leave time to very good use. Carrying his big camera to places like the Rhumboogie Cafe on Chicago's South Side, Grice captured many of the day's most celebrated figures in the party mode. A uniformed Joe Louis smiles with a bevy of chorus girls; a beaming Louis Armstrong sits, horn in hand, at a table with patrons; electric guitar pioneer T-Bone Walker is snapped onstage, wowing the crowd by playing his instrument held above and behind his head. On these forays, Grice was still an amateur, strictly speaking, a twenty-one year-old sailor on the town with his date and his camera. But his pictures are anything but amateurish-time after time, amid the hectic bustle of nightclub settings and in less than ideal light, he managed sharply focused and effectively composed photographs. Opportunity had yet to knock, years of soldiering and schooling were ahead, but when the young man from Arkansas saw his prints, examined for himself the pictures he had made, surely he recognized at least something of what he had done. The pictures were good, even excellent. …