Mike Eliason Photographs ‘Santa Barbara and Beyond’

A Love Story to His Hometown

By Nick Welsh | December 9, 2021

Mike Eliason is a world-class photojournalist and artist who just happens to have spent his whole life living in Santa Barbara. Most (but not all) of his first and only book — Santa Barbara and Beyond: The Photography of Mike Eliason — is a passionately requited love story between Eliason and his hometown.

Eliason takes you places you think you’ve seen so many times that you stopped seeing them. But he shows them to you in ways you never could have imagined. At a time when Santa Barbara’s housing prices, both for sale and for rent, are among the most excruciating in the country, Eliason’s photos remind us — without trying to make any socioeconomic point at all — of the underlying forces driving this inevitably painful reality. With the release of his book, our socioeconomic reality will get only more painful.