DADA COWBOY
Macduff Everton curates the great outdoors with heart and a panoramic camera.
Photography by Macduff Everton
If there’s a mirror of Macduff Everton’s mind, it’s his Santa Barbara studio. Maps of Yucatán, Quintana Roo, and “The World” plaster his ceiling. Buddhist prayer flags fringe the door. Personal touches also include a crucifix from Chiapas, a Batman talking alarm clock, a shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe, and Everton’s own Patriotic Cowboy Icon: a half-quart of Jim Beam framed with Christmas tree lights and cans of Colt .45 and Brew 102. Well-thumbed books like Never Walk When You Can Ride, Farewell to Eden, and The Tree Where Man was Born line the walls, while Saveur, Town & Country, Outside, National Geographic Traveler, Mother Jones, and a slew of other magazines that bear his work share floor space with piles of yellowed newspaper clippings, crumpled mail, and assorted oddities like a roping glove, a carabiner, a headlamp, and a machete. Amid the clutter, there’s all the stuff you’d expect a serious photographer to have—cameras, tripods, light tables, stacks of fine art prints, two spewing fax machines, three screaming phones, bleeping computers, and a boombox wailing with Al Green.
Everton’s studio is, in a word, chaos. You’d be hard-pressed to find a pen in there. But ask for one and he can produce it in a New York minute. (It seems there’s one in his desk drawer! Well...maybe it’s in this backpack...or... and then he’s grinning—a sort of baffled cowboy grin that says, Aw shucks—and the pen, voilà, is in your hand.)
There’s some method to the man’s madness after all. Surely there must be. For it’s this wacky character in the khaki shirt and jeans whose work has less surprisingly won him such past monikers as “Will Rogers with a Camera” and “Dada Cowboy”—and since compelled New York Times photo critic Andy Grundberg to compare him glowingly with Ansel Adams. Indeed, Everton’s photos grace the permanent collections of major museums in Los Angeles, New York, Mexico City, London, Tokyo, and Paris.
With several well-received books to his name, an East Coast gallery to represent him, and his shots appearing both in academic tomes and glossies from Audubon to Vogue, Everton has secured his place in the sun. Though he credits the course of his career to “encouragement from friends” and “serendipity,” it has in truth been a labor of love—gritty labor, and a long time coming.
Born in New York in 1947 to a minister and an aspiring actress, Everton grew up in Oregon and California. Wanderlust and an interest in history inadvertently led him to pick up a camera. Traveling the world for the first time at 17, he inherited an old Kodak Pony from a disenchanted tourist on a Denmark street and starting documenting his explorations for his parents. When he reached Asia, he found an additional audience for his pictures in Asahi press.
Everton next hired on with an educational film company that sent him to work at archaeological sites in Mexico. The company folded, but by that time Everton had formed strong bonds with the landscapes of the Yucatán Peninsula and its indigenous people, the Maya. He spent much of the next decade in the Yucatán, living with Maya families and amassing material for a photography book and personal narrative about life in contemporary Maya society. The book would ultimately become a 20-year effort and straddle a number of journalistic, scientific, and artistic traditions.
Personal touches include a crucifix from chiapas, a Batman talking alarm clock, a shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe, and Everton’s own Patriotic Cowboy Icon: a half-quart of Jim Beam framed with Christmas tree lights and cans of Colt .45 and Brew 102.
During this time, Everton supported himself, his adopted son, and his frequent forays to Mexico by working in the Oregon and California backcountry as a cowboy, mule skinner, and river-rafting guide. He also spent two years as an artist-in-residence for Washington State and wrote and illustrated a children’s book, El Circo Mágico Modelo, about the Mexican circus.
In his mid-thirties—with an Everton-style “why not?”—he decided to continue his formal education. He studied at UC Santa Barbara, earning his BA and an MFA from the College of Creative Studies. His work from this period includes black-and-white prints hand-tinted in “emotional colors” meant to better evokes the sense of a place; the “Recto/Verso” panoramic landscape series, a commentary on context and sense of place that pairs a scene with what would otherwise be the unseen scene directly behind the camera; and his fotoverigraphs, published as That’s Not Entirely True (Tixcacalcupul Press), which combines black-and-white snapshots with affectionately provocative text that together shoot holes in the notion of visual and literal “truths.”
Everton published The Modern Maya: A Culture in Transition (University of New Mexico Press) in 1991, and went on to international acclaim for his travel photography using Noblex and Widelux cameras—panoramic shots in sensuous color of places like Kirby Pool in England, the Taj Mahal in Agra, and El Capitan in Yosemite. The images are at once personal and epic, still and resonant, haunting and full of hope.
The “Dada Cowboy” knows his medium and his subject intimately. While his studio may mirror his mind—which takes a keen interest in nearly everything on the planet—his work reflects the convergence of those interests with his heart and talent. Not long ago, The News of Mexico City said of Everton, “It’s not often a modern artist, of any medium, offers us something commensurate to our capacity to wonder.”
While we ponder the world through his lends in awe, Everton continues along the trail of his own artistic evolution—drawing on experience, following his instincts, acting on faith.
It’s been said that your work has a certain spirituality in it. What do you attribute that to? “I’m an animist, in the sense that I think everything is holy and we have a responsibility not to desecrate it. This probably has something to do with the fact that I’m a minister’s son—I don’t know, my wife often teases me about that. But I believe that whatever I’m shooting is alive. It doesn’t need to be human to be alive. I consider a lot of what I do to be portrait work.
Including your landscapes? To take a good picture is to treat your subject like a portrait, to try to see it as a living thing. For example, water presents a different portrait at different times of the day, so when you photograph it becomes one of the defining characteristics of your shot. If you shoot at high noon when the sun’s rays are directly entering the water, you’ll probably get a good sense of its depth and clarity. But do you shoot the water because of its depth and clarity? It’s like a beautiful woman—maybe a little mystery provides a better portrait of who that person is.
Do you consider yourself part of any photographic movement? No, I’m a humanist. I belong to the hitchhiker’s moment, I believe in the “Church of the Great Outdoors” movement. When I was cowboying and packing, I loved to be above the timberline. It was very desolate, but to me a landscape like that just sings! I’m not trying to show what I’m seeing when I shoot a landscape—I’m trying to show how it makes me feel.
Who do you consider influences on your work? Painters like Vermeer, who used and appreciated light. Constable, Turner, the Dutch Masters—they all had this beautiful use of light. What I respond to most, though, is passion in the work. Vermeer did these very ordinary scenes, but they’re passionate.
It seems somewhat ironic that the first editorial assignment of your career was for Fortune, a magazine aimed at corporate business. The photo editor liked my work, but she said she didn’t want to spoil my “artistic eye” by having me shoot a CEO or something. I told her that, having spent the previous years in the Yucatán jungle, CEOs were as exotic for me as Yucatán would be for someone from New York. I ended up photographing a CEO in Hollywood for them. I actually brought two friends from Mexico with me on the shoot. •
Camera & Darkroom
By Trish Reynales. All rights reserved.
