CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/7/2022

Jeff Divine's 70s Surf Photographs tell it like it was

Featured spreads are from bookseller-favorite Jeff Divine: 70s Surf Photographs, back in stock from T. Adler Books. "It was a moment when everything in our little world felt up for grabs," Pulitzer Prize–winning author William Finnegan writes. "Surfing had boomed in popularity in the beach-blanket sixties, failed its audition as a mainstream televised sport, and then blown itself up in a late-sixties design revolution that reduced boards, seemingly overnight, from nine feet six inches to six feet six, from twenty-five pounds to less than ten. Suddenly, people were turning twice as hard, going twice as fast, and, most transformingly, pulling into heaving barrels that had been unridable, off-limits, the stuff of idle fantasy until yesterday. These changes have all been lasting. The social upheavals of the period touched surfing, but only glancingly—in music, fashion, a wavelet of Eastern mysticism, more than a wavelet of recreational drugs, and a few muddy shining pockets of back-to-the-landism in places where the land happened to about pumping waves."