On January 7, just after the Palisades fire began, the acupuncturist and herbalist Rachel Day left her Westside house for what she feared would be the last time. Gathering her most important possessions, she made sure not to leave behind her collection of postcards featuring photographs taken around the area. There were shots of sunbathers by the Santa Monica Pier and of Palisades Park above them, carpeted by flowers now considered invasive. There were shots of Will Rogers’s house—and more with his car, his stable, and his horse Soapsuds—and of the old Presbyterian Conference Grounds in Temescal Canyon. And there were shots—a lot of them—looking down the Pacific Coast Highway, the mountains out of frame but implied by the downward angle from which traffic’s headlights are seen.
Day was eventually able to return to home, and once back her floor became a staging ground for Hello, Pacific Palisades, a book that reprints the collection (with a few eBay-sourced additions) on old-school linen paper, one card per page. I have found that these images are best experienced cumulatively, by flipping through the entire volume until it concludes with night falling over the ocean in intense 1980s purples. The people behind the lens mostly played the hits, favoring big overlooks of familiar locations, but Day’s curation leads the viewer to look closer, spotting subtle changes made poignant by the large-scale devastation that would inspire the book’s publication.
I have always been a little vexed by my own postcard-collecting habit—why hang on to all this ephemera?—so I find it inspiring that Day was able to make from her stash a memorial for her hometown and a remedy for her grief. This may be the first book of postcards ever to end with a call to action, Day in an afterword challenging her readers to hold accountable the corporations that are destroying our environment, lest places around the world suffer similar fates.
Hello, Pacific Palisades doesn’t reveal the backs of any of the cards, but to my mind they all communicate the most classic postcard sentiment: “Wish you were here.” To send a postcard, especially from a place like Santa Monica, is to tell someone that you’ve arrived somewhere beautiful, and it made you think of them (occasionally with the subtext “Don’t be mad at me”). That sense of longing—and tenderness—accumulates over the course of the book and with the realization that many of the things depicted no longer exist, at least not in the same way. There’s no here here. But if that sounds bleak, the feeling is more than redeemed by the optimism implied by the title. “Goodbye” is what you say to something you’ve lost; “hello” is what you say when you see it anew.