Jeff Divine

Career

Jeff Divine was born in 1950 in San Diego and grew up in La Jolla, California. Passionate about surf­ing, he began tak­ing his first surf pho­tographs in the 1960s and sell­ing them to his high school friends. 

Visual Style

In 1971, the American pub­li­ca­tion Surfer Magazine hired him and sent him around the world to cover some of the best surf­ing loca­tions. He remained a pho­tog­ra­pher for Surfer Magazine and The Surfer’s Journal for 35 years. 

Major Series and Works

Today, Jeff Divine holds one of the largest col­lec­tions of surf pho­tog­ra­phy span­ning from the 1970s to 2009.

Recognition

He has pub­lished numer­ous books, includ­ing Surfing Photographs From The Seventies and Surfing Photographs Taken in The Eighties, pub­lished by Tom Adler Editions. His pho­tographs were exhib­ited at the Oceanside Museum of Art in San Diego in 2007 and in numer­ous gal­leries around the world. 

Reading the Work

Jeff Divine’s work finds its bal­ance in a sun-​soaked doc­u­men­tary style, closely con­nected to action, beaches, surfers, and the visual imag­i­na­tion of the 1970s. It is dis­tin­guished by a strong his­tor­i­cal value, an authen­tic­ity rooted in the field, and an aes­thetic imme­di­ately asso­ci­ated with surf cul­ture. Reading his images ben­e­fits from close atten­tion to nuance: a com­po­si­tional detail, a par­tic­u­lar dis­tance from the sub­ject, light, or tex­ture are often enough to reveal their depth.