The Book of Santa Barbara

Photographs by Macduff Everton

essay by pico iyer

Santa Barbara seems a place of such obvious charms. The golden beaches and sage-covered hillsides are there at first glance, while the Spanish-style townscape issues an invitation to visit all year, thanks to an unvaryingly pleasant Mediterranean climate.
Even so, it takes an artist with a unique vision to reveal the complexity of Santa Barbara’s beauty, as Macduff Everton does so brilliantly in the photographs that grace the pages of this book.
A longtime Santa Barbaran, Everton uses his panoramic camera to reveal the play of light on sea and rock, the quirky corners of historic landmarks and the unexpected variety of lush gardens and open spaces. He captures all the zest of the town’s public celebrations, from the colorful Old Spanish Days Fiesta to the rambunctious Summer Solstice Parade. And he highlights its private character by turning his lens on those who give the place its vitality and interpret it to the world—the athletes and scholars, entrepreneurs and farmers, artists and writers.
Among the artists is Mary Heebner, who has collaborated—in life and in work—with Everton, and who here adds a poetic understanding of Santa Barbara’s natural and human history, the tales writ in the flow of rivers as much as in architectural treasures.
Among the writers is global traveler and sometime Santa Barbara resident Pico Iyer, whose introductory essay so deftly and insightfully illuminates the secret side of this Southern Californian paradise.
Newcomers, frequent visitors, residents—Macduff Everton’s images and The Book of Santa Barbara will surprise and enchant them all.

f f f
A sometime Santa Barbaran since 1965, Pico Iyer has worked in its Mexican restaurants, given lectures at its university, set a novel in the town and acted in a horror movie there. He also writes regularly for Time, the New York Times and The New York Review of Books and is the author of one other novel and seven works of non-fiction.

fff

Mary Heebner is a painter and book artist whose work is included in collections that include the J.P. Getty Research Center, New York Public Library, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, University of California and Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Heebner has published two books joining her paintings with Pablo Neruda’s poetry—On the Blue Shore of Silence: Poems of the Sea and Intimacies: Poems of Love (Harper Collins). In Heebner and Everton’s The Western Horizon (Abrams, 2000) her essays and watercolors complimented his photographs of the American West. Heebner is represented by Edward Cella Art + Architecture. www.maryheebner.com

fff

Macduff Everton has work in the collections of many public and private institutions, including the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; International Center of Photography, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Musee de L’Elysee, Lausanne, Switzerland; Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City, Mexico; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Tokyo Fuji Art Museum. Everton exhibits his photos nationally and internationally. www.macduffeverton.com

fff

Limited edition prints of the landscape photographs are available from Janet Borden Inc.
560 Broadway, NYC.
www.janetbordeninc.com

“Macduff Everton updates travel photography in the same way that Ansel Adams updated 19th century photography of the West. He captures strange and eloquent moments in which time, and the world, seem to stand still.”
Andy Grundberg
New York Times photography critic