Randy Young Curates: ‘Lost Santa Monica & Palisades Images … Found’

By ALISON ROWE | Contributing Writer

Thomas “Randy” Young, Palisadian archivist, photographer and self-described “ne’er-do-well,” adds another accomplishment to his lifelong tally of achievements with the exhibition “Lost Santa Monica & Palisades Images … Found.”

The show, which will open many eyes to the wonders and green beauty of the Palisadian past, will open on Saturday, May 5, at Gallery 169 on W. Channel Road leading up to Rustic Canyon.

The exhibition of about 100 pieces draws from the Young family’s comprehensive collection of photographs and printed materials about the two locations.

The collection, which started in 1971, represents the most complete archive of Pacific Palisades, from its rural beginnings to the present day.

Now, as the collection is being prepared for its new home at the Huntington Library, Young has taken the opportunity to choose some favorites and shine a spotlight on the hidden rarities in his care.

Young chose the exhibition title to describe the way images came into the collection, with particular reference to works by the photographer, Garrison, whose turn-of-the-century glass negatives document the nascent town as a handful of homesteads nestled in the landscape.

“There was nothing in the Palisades in the 1890s and these are pictures of that incredibly bucolic landscape,” Young said. “But it’s sort of mournful, because here’s this beautiful landscape and now it’s covered in McMansions.”

Some of the photographs have never been seen before.

Perhaps the most remarkable of which are Garrison’s early panoramic photographs, preserved in the collection as negatives but never printed.

As Young said: “A negative unprinted is an un-realized potential.”

Bringing into physicality and being an image previously unseen, completing the intention of a photographer from so long ago, is a very powerful act.

It involves painstaking care and skill.

Each five-foot-long image took Young and his colleague, Dale Skinner, half a day to print using an old-school enlarger and the gelatin silver technique.

The technique, which uses continuous rolls of sensitized paper, yields prints of great clarity and depth.

“They’re quite heroic,” Young shared.

Many Palisadians will be familiar with Young’s series of local history books, with text by his late mother, Betty Lou, which he designed and produced.

The most enduring of the seven titles currently appears to be “Pacific Palisades: Where the Mountains meet the Sea.”

It is an authoritative and collaborative guide to history of the area written from several perspectives produced under the aegis of the Pacific Palisades Historical Society.

Making the selection of work for the exhibition has been revealing for Young, for whom the collection has been a life-long passion.

One senses that each piece added, and ancillary collection acquired, has a personal meaning for him, as stages in his becoming the Palisades’ favorite historian.

Young described the overall effect of the exhibition as a “hodge-podge”—an eclectic mix of the various aspects of the wide-ranging collection, which he hopes will come together to communicate the magic he so obviously finds in these pieces.

In addition to the photographs, the exhibition features postcards of the Palisades and the chance to peer into an historic view camera, giving visitors the opportunity to see slides as they might have been experienced by thrill-seekers long gone.

“Lost Santa Monica & Palisades Images … Found” is a fitting title, both elegiac and hopeful as much of the collection takes its permanent place in one of the world’s greatest libraries.