How Alice Rose George Shaped a Pivotal Era in Photography
Susan Meiselas, Alec Soth, Nan Goldin, and others reflect on the life and work of a legendary photo editor and poet.
Photograph by Susan L. Stewart
Remembrances - January 22, 2021
Perhaps the clearest picture of Alice Rose George, beloved editor, curator, teacher, and poet, who died on December 22, 2020, in Los Angeles at the age of seventy-six, can be seen through her own eye, connecting—as she so innovatively did in the books and magazines where she made her mark—all the seeming and revelatory contrasts of her life.
George’s mother was an accomplished pianist who taught her daughter to play Robert Schumann and Frédéric Chopin; her father, who called her “Sweetie Pie,” liked to sing her the 1919 song “Alice Blue Gown,” about a girl heading to town in her silk dress. After George left rural Mississippi in the 1960s, she whittled her nickname down to “Pi,” got a job in the photo department at