Macduff Everton

Peter Galassi, director of photography at Museum of Modern Art, noted the playful creativity of Everton’s early artistic exploration: “Macduff Everton's series of fotoverigraphs is an unusually imaginative and witty piece of work. No academic could offer a more persuasive demonstration of the elasticity of photographic meaning -- or one so full of pleasure and surprise.” An early champion of his landscape portraiture, The New York Times photography critic and curator Andy Grundberg wrote, “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.”

Everton lives in Santa Barbara, California. He married Mary Heebner, also a University of California, Santa Barbara College of Creative Studies alumna, in 1989. Past artistic collaborations include The Western Horizon and Patagonia, La Última Esperanza. They were featured in director Russ Spencer's Full Circle, a documentary about their collaboration on The Western Horizon.

Everton would spend six months at a time in the backcountry, then return to the Yucatán, and finally the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he earned a B.A. in 1981 from the College of Creative Studies and an M.F.A. in 1984 when he was in his mid-30s.

He was married in 1968 to Ruth Everton, but the couple divorced in February 1973. Everton has a son from the previous marriage, Robert Everton.

Everton's first trip to the Yucatán was in 1967. His 1991 book, The Modern Maya: A Culture in Transition, shed light on the Maya people during globalization and critical change. In 2012, the University of Texas Press published The Modern Maya: Incidents of Travel and Friendship in Yucatán. He updated readers on the modern Maya people from his previous book and viewed the effects of racism, tourism, and drugs, among others. Everton has chronicled the lives of his Maya friends and their families over a 40-year span. As he wrote, "While most history chronicles the famous, this book is about the lives of ordinary people who are the soul of their culture."

Macduff Everton (born August 13, 1947) is an American photographer, known for his work with the Maya primarily on the Yucatán Peninsula.

Macduff Everton was born on August 13, 1947 in Pearl River, New York to missionaries.