Download PDF scan of original article

If there is a quintessentially Southern California artist involved in the present project, that person may be George Blakely. Born in Long Beach in 1951, Blakely studied art with Eileen Cowin and Darryl Curran at California State University, Fullerton. He also worked for seven years for Orange County’s fourth-largest employer, the primary image manufactory of American popular culture, Disneyland.

The main themes of Blakely’s art are the ubiquity and universality of the photographic experience in modern culture, themes suggested by the frenetic image-making activity in which most Disneyland visitors engage. He has made art from discarded Polaroid paper negatives and found images such as snapshots, sugar packets and book illustrations. But his most evolved and ingenious works are produced using rejected prints from commercial photo-processing labs. These he has organized in various ways, sorting by color or subject matter or papering gallery walls and floors in eye-dazzling installations.

Surly, though, A Cubic Foot of Photographs, 1978, is his most poetic statement, bulging with the weight of dreams, memories and facts, yet as densely inaccessible and generic as a stone.