The Surfers Journal
Light / Dark
“That’s my indicator,” says Jeff Divine, staring out his bedroom window and pointing down at Seal Rock. We’re high up in San Clemente’s steeply terraced suburbia of remodeled mid-’60s tract builds, touring House Divine, home to him and his wife, Julie, and we’ve paused to take in the details of his grand vista. Divine traces the horizon northward with his finger. “When there’s surf,” he says, “I can see big lines rolling in all the way across and breaking on the tip of Dana Point.”
Now 74, Divine has spent a lifetime staring at the sea—more than 50 years of it through a camera, his lens pointed at surfers, capturing some of the act’s and the culture’s most referenced moments. The effects of a life dedicated to surf photography are obvious in his countenance—a saturation by ultraviolet rays, bloodshot eyes, a disarming grin, and a half-baked chuckle.
He’s gazing out his window with awe, as if seeing the ocean for the first time. Overcast skies, pancake swell, and southern devil texture don’t seem to make what he’s looking at now, what he’s looked at nearly every day of his life, any less captivating. It triggers an inventory of his past ocean views.
“I’ve been really spoiled with houses,” he says in a patois that’s somehow monotone and animated at the same time. “I grew up in La Jolla Shores, two blocks from the beach. My grandma lived in a beautiful home in La Jolla designed by Sim Bruce Richards, who apprenticed with Frank Lloyd Wright. When I moved to Hawaii, I lived at Ke Iki Beach, right on the beach. I lived at Waimea Bay, right on the point. Lived at Makaha for a little bit. Lived at Off The Wall in the A-frame next to the right-of-way. My friend Norman had a house right at Pipeline. He was going on tour for over a year with Captain & Tennille, a corny singing group from LA that did the hit song ‘Muskrat Love.’ He asked me if I wanted to rent his house. No-brainer. My window looked right out at Pipeline. The rent was always, like, 150 bucks.”
He’s not flexing—just reminiscing in astonishment at how he’s been so lucky to have the Pacific horizon as an omnipresent fixture outside the windows of his life.
“When I moved back to California in the ’80s, I bought a plot here in San Clemente, way up on Avenida Salvador. I hired my friend Wallace Cunningham to design a home. It was hyper-modern, very angular, and floor-to-ceiling glass. It looked directly down at Cottons. You can see it from the freeway. I eventually sold it.”
Divine’s Cunningham home, often referenced as “Sea View,” was one of the architect’s early career builds. Later, Cunningham would design award-winning homes featured often in Architectural Digest and other publications. Most notably, his La Jolla “Razor House” overlooks Black’s Beach from the edge of the 300-foot cliff and is today owned by platinum-certified R&B singer Alicia Keys and her husband, hip-hop producer Swizz Beatz. The couple made local headlines in 2019 when they bought the home for $20.8 million.
“I moved into this house in 2000,” Divine says. “It was a single story when I bought it. We added this second story to include the main bedroom and office a few years later, after I climbed up on the roof to do some work, saw this view, and went, ‘Holy shit!’”
*
The seeds for Divine’s surf photography career were planted early. As a child, he’d walk to Black’s from the Shores, pass through Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and peer into its study tanks holding dolphins and seals. He learned to ride waves—and got his first barrel—on an inflatable Hodgman raft. He got his first surfboard at 14, despite some resistance from his parents. The drunken debauchery perpetrated by surfers around the cove at Windansea was the scuttlebutt among the Shores’ family-based community.
“All the dads were these ex-military officers who had speed bags in their garages,” Divine says while rhythmically punching the air. “They were all Golden Gloves boxers, watermen, badass gentlemen that didn’t take shit. They were fair and diplomatic and could wipe you out in two seconds if you wanted to be a brawling heathen. They kept us in line.”
After saving enough money from working at John Cole’s Book Shop, where a room dedicated to Baja California literature and cartography was an invaluable resource for local southbound surfers long before Google Earth, 16-year-old Divine bought a Pentax H1a. During an early shoot, he fried his new camera’s cloth shutter by focusing his 400-millimeter lens on sun glare—which, like a magnifying glass, channeled the center of the universe’s power into a beam. The smoke wafting from the camera body only motivated him to keep shooting. “I went right into the whole thing,” he says. “I’d go to Black’s with my camera and an apple in a brown bag, surf, and then shoot.”
Local magazines—and, eventually, Surfer—began biting on Divine’s submissions while he was still in his teens. He credits the early success to DNA. “My grandmother was an artist,” he explains, “my mom was in the arts, and my dad was an architect. I genetically inherited something. The magic of good photography is forming up things within a rectangle and lining things up within that. It’s a relationship between your brain and this thing that interests you. You either have the ability to capture mood and feeling or you don’t.”
It was clear Divine had it. His dad’s friends at the local tennis club began complimenting him on his son’s work, which they’d seen in local magazines—validating that Divine’s surf pursuits weren’t turning him into a derelict rebel. His buddies noticed too. They would gather at his grandma’s house, where, between making surfboards in the skunkworks they built in her garage, they’d view slideshows of their sessions shot and narrated by Divine.
By 1970, he was operating heavy machinery. Armed with a Nikon motor drive, and issued a Century 1000 lens and a steady flow of film by Surfer, he was on the prowl. He’d shoot all over La Jolla when it was on, burn rubber if it was firing elsewhere. “We’d check the swell direction at La Jolla Shores,” Divine says. “Based on where it was breaking, we’d go to the [Sunset] Cliffs, Mexico, North County, or wherever. We’d sneak off because people would follow us, thinking that we knew better than they did. So we had body language and signals that meant ‘Let’s go right now.’ Anybody lagging got left behind.”
A year later, he was based in Hawaii, where he created a decade-defining file. He’d kick out through the shorebreak on his Hodgman mat—the same type he’d learned to ride waves on—with his Mart Toggweiler–built water housing, fire his 36 frames, kick in, load a new roll, and repeat. Or he’d post up on the beach with his tripod, rib fellow photographers, and shoot the shit with passersby.
Divine moved along Surfer’s masthead from shooter to photo editor in 1981, a position that returned him to the mainland. His tenure at the light table lasted 17 years. He traveled a lot in between deadlines: Indonesia, Central America, Europe, South Africa, Antarctica, Tonga, Norway, Iceland—everywhere. Like a one-two punch, his megawatt smile and laugh combo would transform locals enraged by cameras on their beach into convivial dinner hosts. “There were some grand spreads,” he remembers. He was also artful in the diplomacy required to work with top-tier surfers, fellow photographers, editorial staffers, and salesy ad people, where politics and drama can run hot across all sectors.
After Surfer, Divine worked as the photo editor at The Surfer’s Journal for 18 years. Along with sourcing the visuals for each issue, extracurriculars included gallery showings, archiving, and publishing several photo books. He retired from TSJ in 2016 but remains a near-oracular contributor. When tasked with a unicorn request by the photo department, he always has a lights-out, unpublished photo ready on short notice.
“I try to be the type of photographer that made my job easy as a photo editor,” he says.
*
Divine and I walk across the second-story landing past a large-scale print of Cowboys, New Mexico, 1939, by famed twentieth-century Life photographer Horace Bristol. We take a brief detour into a den. Carrying the sentiment of John Severson’s 1960 epithet, “In this crowded world the surfer can still seek and find the perfect day, the perfect wave, and be alone with the surf and his thoughts,” into the downright cramped twenty-first century, Divine’s 2003 photo of Jordan Heuer at Lance’s Right with no one out, slotted in a sheet-glass tube, hangs framed in hand-tooled Indonesian wood.
“Sonny Miller and I went art shopping in Bali,” he says. “I bought some paintings and had to disassemble the frames to fit in my suitcase. I rolled up the paintings and carried them on the plane. That flight from Bali wipes you out. When we landed, I was out of it and accidentally left the paintings in the airport bathroom. I love the frames so much I used them to frame my photos.”
Art pieces and photos holding sentimental meaning adorn each hall. He tells me about how he’d often trade photo prints with the artists who created many of the works in his collection: pastel-colored sewn mandalas by Thomas Campbell. A moody seascape by Wolfgang Bloch. A set of Alex Weinstein’s hyperrealistic Swell Model resin panels, each one looking as if a square foot of ocean surface has been permanently paused, extracted, and hung on Divine’s wall. An abstract by Alex Couwenberg. A signed lithograph of Juan O’Gorman’s psychedelic 1955 illustration Flores Imaginarius, which he inherited from his grandmother. Resin art by Casper Brindle, a Valentine’s Day present to Julie. A small Buddha shrine with offerings of light and flowers. The ti-leaf lei he wore to Art Brewer’s memorial is his dining room table’s centerpiece.
A polished slab of fossilized orthoceras hangs by his front door. “The colors pop when it gets wet,” he says as he licks his palm and rubs one of the 400-million-year-old squids. Sure enough, like a photo print coming to life while bathing in developer fluid, beautiful gray-scale patterns on the cephalopod’s shell become vivid and shine as the spit spreads.
In his office, Divine plants his lean 6-foot-3 frame in his chair and turns on his large desktop monitor. He’s flanked by meticulously organized stacks of plastic boxes labeled with decade, location, and grade—“Hawaii, ’70s, A+”—each one filled with slides in plastic sheets. He pulls one out, holds it to the natural light, and scans it with his loupe.
He puts the slides and loupe down, turns toward his monitor, and pulls up the selects for the following portfolio. Nearly 60 years ago, he was rigging a screen and projector in his grandma’s living room, dimming the lights, and presenting his surf images to his frothing teenage friends. For 35 years as a photo editor, his colleagues anxiously anticipated being summoned for a “boil,” where Divine would show two or three trays of selects. “It was fun,” he says. “You’d get everybody’s opinion. It eliminated the last-minute bullshit of ‘Wait, that one’s no good,’ because all the photos I’d show were good.”
As he clicks through the photos, detailed anecdotes behind each one start to flow: who was shooting next to him, the mic-drop punchlines delivered during the shit-talking, the oddball distractors who somehow interpret a 1,000-millimeter lens as a waving flag indicating, “Come talk to me.” He even remembers the moments he missed—an intangible box of haunting stills that exists only in his mind.
“These archives are like an annuity that fulfills me even more than the income they provide, because I get to look at them all the time,” Divine says. “It’s an emotional annuity to me. Most people have a career. When they retire at 70 or whatever, they don’t remember jack about their day-to-day. I’m really lucky. I get to revisit my work repeatedly and look at the reality of the places I experienced and the people I met.”
Every few photos, he glances back out his window at the sea.
[Feature by Kevin Voegtlin]
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