Photomural May Stay in Canyon Until Year’s End

“The Tell,” the giant photomural in Laguna Canyon that originally was scheduled to come down Sept. 30, will apparently stay up until at least mid-November and perhaps until the end of the year.

Mark Chamberlain, organizer of “The Tell,” has been campaigning to let it stay up until insurance on the site runs out at the end of December.

The subject came up informally at Tuesday’s Laguna Beach City Council meeting in connection with city plans for a Nov. 11 march through the canyon to protest the Irvine Co.’s planned Laguna Laurel housing and commercial development.

At that meeting, the City Council voted $3,000 toward organizing the protest walk and plans to ask Caltrans to close Laguna Canyon Road to cars on the day of the event.

“The Tell” would be the destination of the march, said Councilwoman Lida Lenney. “We certainly want it to be up that long” and perhaps longer, Lenney said, although no final date has been set. Chamberlain has said the mural would take at least two weeks to dismantle.

The mural, 636 feet long, consists of thousands of donated family snapshots that hundreds of volunteers glued to a plywood support structure.

Chamberlain and his volunteer assistants are still putting the finishing touches on the project. “It’s just so big, it’s taken much more time than any of us could have imagined,” Chamberlain said Monday.

“I would like to see it stay up long enough to both complete all the fine points” and “to let it function as a piece of art,” he added.

“The Tell,” meanwhile, is gaining some national attention; Chamberlain is traveling to Snowmass Village, Colo., this week, where he has been invited to give a presentation on “The Tell” at a regional conference of the Society for Photographic Education, entitled “The Political Landscape: New Directions in Interpreting the West.”