Second ‘Book of Santa Barbara’ Looks Forward and Back

Second Book of Santa Barbara
Looks Forward and Back

Photographer Macduff Everton and Artist Mary Heebner
Update 2010 Tome with More Pics, Places, People, and Pages

By Matt Kettmann | Photos by Macduff Everton
December 4, 2025

The Book of Santa Barbara is back, and it’s bigger than ever.

Fifteen years since the original publishing of this photographic exploration of all things American Riviera, the husband-and-wife team of photographer Macduff Everton and artist/writer Mary Heebner are releasing an updated second edition of their coffee table book, stuffed with even more faces and scenes unique to our corner of the world.

“A lot of things happened in 15 years,” said Everton, as he showed me the book in the library of their Samarkand home. “We wanted to round it out, and add things that weren’t just paradise,” explained Heebner, who helped curate the selections and wrote most of the captions. “We had mudslides. We had protests…. It gives you a fuller view of life in Santa Barbara, and you never know — in those big shots of the protests and events, you might be in it.”

“Hopefully, you’re in it,” added Everton. “Hopefully, you were there!”

Their combined résumé rivals any creative couple in modern memory. He’s been shooting across the globe for international magazines such as National Geographic and Condé Nast Traveler — we also collaborated on our 2020 S.B. County wine book, Vines & Vision — while her paintings and handmade art books are in collections from The Getty in L.A. and Library of Congress in D.C. to the British Museum in London and Fundación Pablo Neruda in Santiago, Chile.

The original book in 2010 was motivated by multiple fronts. The post-recession freelance market was weak for Everton, and then there was some good old-fashioned spite. At a downtown gallery show of his international images, he overheard someone claim that if they’d gone to such exotic places, they’d have great photos too. “It just pissed me off,” said Everton. “I should just take pictures here in Santa Barbara if they think it’s that easy.”

Simultaneously, his long-awaited Modern Maya — a book about his decades of living around the Yucatán Peninsula — had finally come out. “There was this joke going around: ‘It took you 40 years to do a book. What’s your next book project?’” recalled Everton. He got so fired up to make something fast that the first Book of Santa Barbara barely took more than six months.

Heebner, however, said that the book came from a place of healing — both for Everton’s recovery from knee surgery but also to reconnect to a Santa Barbara where they had long resided but maybe not properly lived for years.

“I’d go with him as much as I could, but Macduff was on the road 260 days a year,” said Heebner, who was often his model on travel shoots (and appears even more than me and jazzman Charles Lloyd in this new book). “So, ‘home’ was getting slides and doing laundry and repacking and leaving. We really weren’t in Santa Barbara. It was part of healing to go out, really slow down, and look at some of the places and people we’re friends with.”

Encouraged by Steve Cushman, then at the S.B. Chamber of Commerce, and empowered by a 500-copy order from the since-shuttered Santa Barbara Bank & Trust, 2010’s Book of Santa Barbara was an immediate smash. “It was Chaucer’s highest-selling book ever,” said Heebner. 

Clocking in at 376 pages compared to the original 234 — yet on smoother, thinner paper that keeps the width down — the 2025 version includes dozens of brand-new portraits and pictures of very recent events such as Bloomsday at the James Joyce in June and last month’s No Kings protest. Unlike the first book, which only included a few archival shots — such as Everton riding a horse in his cowboying days — there are a bunch of rarely seen shots from his extensive archives stretching back to the 1960s.

That includes the old State Street/Highway 101 intersection — juxtaposed with a spread on the new Jeff Shelton underpass — and shots of the 1969 oil spill, right next to images from the one in 2015. “Some things don’t change,” lamented Heebner, while pointing out that Everton was able to sweet-talk his way into getting a photo of the actual pipe that burst above Refugio Beach.

Not much was cut from the original, either. “If somebody died, they stayed in the book,” said Everton. “But if they moved from town, we took them out.”

Adding to the girth is an afterword by the Santa Barbara Independent’s own Nick Welsh, whose vivid verbosity is granted nearly eight pages. There’s also a new foreword by Pico Iyer. It all ends with a small photo of Macduff and Mary’s wedding in 1989.

“There’ve been a lot of changes in the last 15 years,” explained Heebner of why you’ll want this book even if you already have the first one. “Yet there are some threads, especially evident in the landscape, that make you realize what an amazingly beautiful and resilient place it is.”

Macduff Everton and Mary Heebner will sign copies of The Book of Santa Barbara at Chaucer’s Books (3321 State St.; 805-682-6787; chaucersbooks.com) on Sunday,  December 7, at 4 p.m., and at Lost Horizon Bookstore (539 San Ysidro Rd., Montecito) on Saturday, December 13, at 2 p.m. See bookofsantabarbara.com.