Surf photo god Jeff Divine annihilates moral boundaries in new must-have coffee table book

"It was horrifying, but what mattered was the quality of what ended up on the light table."

“We were in a rarified world doing what we loved. We did anything we wanted, went anywhere we wanted, and were paid for it.”

Doors opened wide if you were Jeff Divine, the prolific lensman, former photo editor of Surfer Magazine and The Surfer’s Journal, who spent fifty years capturing images of a world he helped create.

His surf history anthology is now available for close inspection in Divine Surf: Five Decades of Surfing Action and Culture. It’s a brick-high retrospective of the images that helped shape the sport from outsider oddity to quintessential cool. Filled with hundreds of glossy shots and a forward by Matt Warshaw, the book should be read with a bib. The hardbound collection traces a 50-year arc of surfing through his most recognized work dating back from the mid-sixties when Divine popped off his first shots.

Divines’ body of work revels in the spectacular finite moments of surfing; there is no before and is no after, only captured frames of perfection to tell a story, however incomplete; the ugly parts are left to the imagination: travel dust in the teeth and cuts on feet on reef. But it’s exactly what Divine chooses to leave out that makes magic on the page. The viewer puts his jealous little face up to the paper and lusts to be where he’s been: under the lip at Pipeline with Tom Carroll, Avoca with Nat Young, Namotu with Bobby Martinez, and even his hometown of La Lolla Shores where the young Divine introduced himself to photography.

At 14, the young Southern California native grabbed a little Pentax A1A and began clicking anything in view: puddles, trees, sidewalks, the ocean. Classmates paid Jeff a dollar a pop to take a photo of them surfing. At just 18, he snapped a frame that landed on the cover of San Diego Magazine, a sundown shot of La Jolla Cove with tuna boat silhouettes in the background and agave trees in the fore. Dad was an architect, mom a music major, and grandmother an artist, each providing equal parts encouragement and genetic code.

Divine figured out early that his DNA led him to photography. “We are all unique like fingerprints,” he says. “The camera is just a tool, a planer, it’s within the person to make the art with that tool.” His natural ability for composition came through quickly.

His grandmother told the teenager to gather his ten favorite slides. She gave them to a well-known photographer because she wanted to know if he showed promise in a professional’s eyes. It was the first time someone said, “Oh, you’ve got talent.” 

“I was just following my instincts.  I started surfing in ‘54 at 14 and became enamored with the perfect wave,” Divine says.  “Then I started playing around with the camera down at Big Rock and Windansea.” At the time, few photographers planted themselves on the California coastline. It was wide-open, free-range wilderness and rare to see someone else shooting. It was like the kid down the street with an iguana. Unusual.

His first shot in Surfer came in ’68, a graceful Margo Oberg slipping across the water perched on the nose at Hammonds Reef. Divine’s family and friends recognized his early talent, and when praise and passion combine, a career likely follows.

“I was so immersed in surfing that there was never a question and never looked back,” says Divine. “I started getting photos in Surfer magazine and completely immersed in the craft and addicted to surfing.”

Largely self-taught (Divine says neither he nor the prolific elder lensman Ron Stoner possessed the dispositions to exchange ideas. Divine too shy; Stoner too gone.), Divine spent the next few years up shooting what he could to sell to Surfer Magazine for $25 an image. He shot up and down the south California coast: Huntington, Laguna Canyon, Santa Barbara, anywhere and everywhere he could point. He regularly visited the ballroom floor of the very private Hollister Ranch, often motoring in from Gaviota Pier. Ranch manager Dick LaRue brought opened the gates for him hoping the photos divine sold to Surfer would act as marketing promos to sell off parcels of the 136 parcels of Santa Barbara land. Locals there, however, eyed him as custodians do gum in a urinal. Within minutes of setting up his big lens tripod, they’d yell at him to get the hell out.

“Yeah, I got hassled at Hollister. I felt bad about that because I agreed with having it kept private, especially how crowded California was getting,” he says. It didn’t stop him, however, from slinking into the shadows, covertly snapping away at the dancers.

The evolving culture of the late 60’s brought an end to the apparent innocence documented in early surf photos of the era. No more soft black-and-white images of teenage boys goofing in the sand, rolling down the dunes. No more white smiles beaming from the windows of mom’s wagon. The decade traded madras for madness and calls into question even today what the halcyon days really were.

Divine captured bearded flute players, hand-painted milk trucks dripping with starbursts of color, and concerts on the sand filled with stoned and swaying kids. A famous photo shows David Nuuhiwa, considered to be one of best surfers at the time, huddling on the ground next to the infamous John Gale, flanked by a teen bent over staring into the psychedelic airbrush of a Rainbow twinny. Surfer sent Divine to get shots of Nuuhiwa and ended up at Johnny’s, home to the Brotherhood of Eternal Love. Gale would later be arrested on drug trafficking charges. Such was the culture.

As Californian breaks grew more crowded, surfers of the 70’s searching for bluer, steeper pastures leapt across the Pacific and Divine followed, setting out to shoot the evolving scene of the Hawaiian Islands, Oahu in particular.

He aimed his lens at anyone competent at Pipeline, regardless of status. Even “neighborhood nobodies.” These, according to Divine, fell into two categories: the “sons and daughters of people who had real jobs in Honolulu. Some were derelict, hang-at-the-beach-all-day types. Others were transplants enamored with the North Shore lifestyle that, within months, had them speaking mangled, faux pidgin.” He shot them all, and sometimes exclusively owing to clever Hawaiian tactics, forcing everyone out of the water except themselves. “Everyone’s the same,” Divine laughs. “Everyone wants their picture taken.”

But hunting the big names were the real prize: Terry Fitzgerald, Barry Kanaiaupuni, Jeff Hakman, and the whole gang in and out of the water, including the front porch scene of who’s who at fellow lensman Bernie Baker’s house overlooking Sunset, then the universe of the North Shore and later, the family portrait of the Astrodeck Wave Warriors.

And there was plenty of Gerry, loads of Gerry. During the 70s, Divine snapped the most inarguably famous frames of Lopez ever captured. The rawboned Hawaiian with an unspooled spine redefined tube riding while atop his hand-shaped Lightning Bolts, the proof landing front-and-center in the pages of Surfer. Today, he and Lopez maintain a friendship, but the two never spoke during those seminal years. Divine chalks it up to their equally quiet dispositions but is still curious, as much of their careers were made from one another’s performance. (Similarly, Divine and 11-time world Champion Kelly Slater never spoke when housed together on a Tongan boat trip.)

And there’s the iconic shot of a young Buttons Kaluhiokalani prone, looking back over his shoulder, flashing a peace sign and a million-dollar smile. “It was a right place, right time” moment. A mix of town guys and locals crowding the lineup caused occasional tension. “Buttons burned this local guy with a purple mohawk and ponytail. Scary guy. He freaked out on Buttons, screaming,” Divine recalls. “But he just turned around, stretched out a peace sign and said, ‘Peace, bro.’” 

Click!

Divine lives by the rule that a photographer does not put himself between the camera and his subjects.

The late Diane Arbus wrote that “the camera is a kind of passport that annihilates moral boundaries and social inhibitions, freeing the photographer from any responsibility toward the people photographed. The whole point of photographing people is that you are not intervening in their lives, only visiting them. The photographer is super tourist, an extension of the anthropologist, visiting natives and bringing back news of their exotic doings and strange gear.”

The artist doesn’t interpret, it’s said. He visits, walks into someone else’s life for a moment to observe. Takes a snapshot of another’s life. Put enough snapshots together and we get a flip-book history of the times.

Divine’s skill for composition positions us into the scene, perfectly in frame and focus. We look, our eyes bouncing around the corners of the page and leaning into the fine print to fill in the blanks of what happened, creating little stories in our heads, trying to feel what it was like to be shot out of the barrel of a gun.

Yet the impossible neutrality of the photographer is revealed in direction of his lens. After nearly a decade planted on the North Shore, Surfer chief Jim Kempton offered Divine the role of photo editor after Art Brewer’s departure. He flew back to the mainland and suddenly found himself the arbiter of cool, “the guardian of the gates,” as he explains.

“The aim at Surfer was to show the best surfers on the best waves. I was looking at it from the core to show it to the outer world. It was all about our world,” Divine says.

Photos in each edition showcased that world to surfers exactly what was possible and what it should look like: Crouch and tuck knee mid-face like Tom Curren? Got it. Hold front arm down like Peter McCabe? Will do.  Square shoulders like Shaun Thomson? I’m on it.

Style bled through the magazine pages into readers’ idea of what a surfer looked like on land, too. When asked about his influence on curating the culture, Divine plays it cool.

“We weren’t interested in the fashion but showed it as it was. In the sixties it was khakis and a white t-shirt maybe with a stripe across it. In the 70’s we were traveling more and bring things back from where we surfed like the Mexican wedding shirt or huaraches, or wrist bands from Bali, or custom-made shirts from hippies or puka shell necklaces. It was the natural look,” Divine says. “We were rebels, outdoorsmen, and all that vibe in the 70’s specially that affected the fashion thing.

“I read an article in the NY Times that it was the cool thing to have a Surfer magazine on the coffee table. But we couldn’t care less.”

However unconscious Divine and the boys at Surfer appeared, their monthly spreads proved too attractive to the under-30 crowd that swung from the coasts.

As Surfing: The Lifestyle! caught America’s collective eye (so shiny smooth and tan), surf companies – like all companies do – smelled cash in the water.

“When the action sports thing came in in the 80’s, it changed everything. Prior, we had no nothing. We’d carry a brown or a Oaxaca bag like you carried groceries in in Mexico. All of a sudden, we had everything. Companies would send us hats, shorts, the whole nine yards.”

While brands pushed and pulled to bend the culture in their favor, Divine managed the sea change with aplomb, ensuring Surfer’s traditional ethos remained while still growing the mag. Companies wanted photos of their guys wearing their trunks, their watches, and their stickers featured. “But criticism didn’t faze us. We had a ton of confidence. Some didn’t understand how we made decisions. They didn’t have a clue what thought went into each issue,” he says. 

As photo editor, choices had to be made and the “best surfers on the best waves” guided image selection under Divine’s careful eye.

“We were good at what we did.”

Did it make everyone happy? No.

Aside from the corporate tugging, countless freelance photographers hounded the photo staff. Some were desperate, some money hungry, others drug-crazed and unstable. “It was hard to deal with everybody’s baggage. It was horrifying, but what mattered was the quality of what ended up on the light table. Some of the craziest photogs had the best pictures. We just wanted the best work,” Divine recalls. “I was always nice and charming, but it was tough to deal with people who came in to show me their average pictures, but we treated everyone nicely. But you can’t tell people their babies are ugly, so it was tough.”

After almost twenty years at Surfer followed by a long run at The Surfer’s Journal, Jeff said goodbye to official editorial duties to focus on independent work, recording critical moments in surfing well into the 2000’s. Divine figured he rather roam the surf world than be told where to go.

In Divine Surf, we see Bruce Irons hovering ten feet above Lance’s Right, Barney Barron penny dropping off a Backdoor wall, and 11-time world champion Kelly Slater raising his palms into the air in disbelief after exiting a serpentine Grajagan barrel.

Even today, he keeps his go-bag: film, mosquito nets, mask, fins, rope, and malaria medicine, because you just never know. And this morning, like most, the impossibly youthful 76-year-old wakes early, reads the Times and BeachGrit, grabs his wife then walks to the bluffs overlooking Capo Beach. He mind-surfs when south swells break.

More a realist than philosopher, Divine is hesitant to knot photography to some larger meaning and looks back humbly,

“When you are younger, you never think about aging. When you are older, you live more vicariously through online media. I’m not checking out Rincon or driving to Mavericks’ anymore. It’s too bad that we live online more. It’s like driving to surf with your buddy and you see something spectacular and point: at the lighthouse, the tree, the truck and if you don’t catch it right away, you miss it. If you’re not seeing in the moment, it’s gone.”

Essential, like oils.

Divine Surf was released this month.