The classic Jeff Divine formula: right place, right time, right subject…and just the right moment. The late Andy Irons, Lance’s Right.
The waves at El Salvador’s Punta Mango were so good that day that we forgot he was there. But of course, he was. Just as on countless hot, glassy mornings before, on many different seas, in this case sitting on the hard wooden thwart of a local “panga” skiff, the black barrel of his camera lens poking out from under the brim of a sun hat, intently focused. Every movement on every wave experienced through his mind’s eye and with a trigger finger that has reacted to capture a million moments; anticipating, every single time, that moment that makes for a great surf photo.
There would be plenty that morning at Punta Mango. And yet, when the sea breeze finally exhaled, and one by one, we paddled back to the panga and crawled up over the gunwales, Jeff Divine didn’t turn away from the now-empty lineup, but watched as a last big set poured through unridden. “Look at that wave,” he said, with a tone of wonder in his voice. As if he had never seen a wave like that before; as if he hadn’t been looking at those same waves for the past five hours.
For the past five decades, actually. During the more than 50 years that Jeff Divine has been chronicling surfing and surf culture without ever turning away, he’s established a legacy that can only find him described as one of the sport’s truly legendary photographers. With the vast breadth and width of that legacy captured in the upcoming volume, Divine Surf: Five Decades Of Surfing Action & Culture, from Rizzoli Books.
From his earliest days in the late-1960s, a teenager with his first camera shooting the waves and surfers in his hometown of La Jolla, California, to the first of dozens of winters on Oahu’s North Shore beginning in 1971; with a sheaf of expired passports filled with exotic stamps from Australia, South Africa, Indonesia, the Mascarenes, French Polynesia, Mexico and Central America; compiling portraits of everyone from teenaged world champion Margo Godfrey to teenaged world champion Carissa Moore, from BK to PT to AI with about a hundred classic “Divine rainbow shots” between; over years of manning the light table as photo editor at SURFER magazine, and later at The Surfer’s Journal; when it comes to modern surf history (read: the past half century-plus) the man has literally seen it all.
“Divine came to prominence at a time when a photographer’s career was measured in part by film rolls,” writes preeminent surf historian, colleague and friend Matt Warshaw in the foreword to Divine Surf. “He was hired at SURFER at age 19 — straight from high school to the big leagues, in other words — and never again had to pay for film. But the rolls were not bottomless, and there was a code of cool to follow….pick your moments. Conserve. Anticipate. The idea was to ride along with Buttons or Margo or Lopez and ‘connect,’ as the jargon went, with their moves. You had to be a surfer too. Not as good a surfer as the people you were shooting, but good enough to know what was going to happen before it happened. Jeff had all those skills. He was versatile and hard-working, lived and breathed weather conditions, knew when and where to set up, planned things out hours, days, weeks in advance. We didn’t use the phrase back then, but he was surf photography’s complete package.”
Divine Surf then reflects that esteemed opinion, in that when it comes to presenting, between front and back covers, a colorful, vibrant, insightful picture of contemporary surfing and the surfing life, this book is the complete package. As well as fitting testimony to where photographer Jeff Divine sits in the pantheon of surfing’s most talented and influential image-makers: in Spartan context, as one of The Immortals.
Divine Surf: Five Decades Of Surfing Action & Culture is available from Rizzoli Books, September 15, 2026
