'The Santa Monica Mountains'
by Matthew Jaffe, photography by Tom Gamache

"As a resident of the suburban canyon system that borders the northern and northwest fringes of Los Angeles, I’m partial to this spectacular collection. It’s a visual and literary tribute to an important, but little known feature of this gigantic sprawl of a city.

Range on the Edge gives us a rare and beautiful photographic portrait, and historical profile, of the rural Santa Monica Mountains. Lofty, undulating and wild, carpeted with tinder-dry chaparral scrub forest, the Santa Monicas and the arroyos that intersect them have a stern, but delicate beauty that requires the patience and sensitivity of a naturalist and photographer like Tom Gamache to capture.

Fire is the natural centerpiece in the life cycle of this rare plant community, and every couple of years, large tracts burn off in spectacular, newsworthy conflagrations that illuminate night skies above this tangle of freeways and skyscrapers and neighborhoods, from Hollywood to the shores of coastal Malibu. Deep inside the natural infrastructure of the Santa Monicas, Gamache reveals a complex biosphere of rare serenity—sweeps of riparian meadowland, thick stands of oak and sycamore that filter shafts of morning light, and massive, prehistoric rock faces, whose heights disappear into low afternoon shrouds of ocean mist.

This is the realm of coyotes and bobcats, mule deer, rabbits, squirrels, the titmouse and the red-tailed hawk. They are the true native Angelenos, occupants of an enormous natural resource, still known mostly to the rest of the world as home to the Hollywood Sign."

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'The Santa Monica Mountains' by Matthew Jaffe, photography by Tom Gamache

'The Santa Monica Mountains'
by Matthew Jaffe, photography by Tom Gamache