The cover photos in this era are often psychedelic, as are the font colors,
and the title is written in all lower case to look nonconformist.
The drug culture of this era influenced everything from photography to fashion.
The conservative Zeitgeist that began in the late 1970s, associated largely with Reagan and Bush, generally regarded anything dealing with sexuality as immoral. The standard practice and socially expected reaction of women everywhere was to try to be offended by everything possible, especially anything sexual, but also anything that hinted of racism. Any SDM cover that even hinted at sexuality was followed by scores of letters from American women writing in to say how upset they were, always using terms like "disgust," "offended," "appalled," and "shocked."
Women apparently want men to be extremely attracted to them, enough to marry them, but not to enjoy looking at photos of women afterwards. How could women possibly hope to get one effect without the other? How incredibly unrealistic!
In the meantime, while government was succesfully convincing all these foolish women that sexuality was their main threat, the government was committing possibly the worst ecological abuses in history, such as killing off large numbers of whales in large expanses of ocean each year via Navy sonar of unjustified power, the use of which was in turn fueled by illogical hysteria over the 9/11 incident.
SDM, January 2001, p. 22
SDM, January 2001, p. 23
Also note that the magazine title now looks slightly more formal, with initial capitalized letters, to fit the mood of the new formal, rigidly controlled society.
 August 1968 |
This issue not only has personal meaning since it was the first issue I ever received by subscription, but it also had a fortunate confluence of good articles and advertisements that no other issue had that year. That was the last month that the Benson gyrocopter ads, Avon dive boat ads, and color ads for the John Pennekamp wall chart were ever run, for example. The color cover photo of the lady underwater in Miami with the gorgonians is great, and the photos for that article inside are beautiful. There are some sexy ladies in the articles on Las Vegas and Miami, and the article about sea worms possibly providing a cure for cancer was fascinating. |
 January 1967 |
This issue also has some personal meaning, since it was one of the first issues I ever owned, given to me by my late friend and diving buddy of many years, Ken Hines. I love the cover photo with the experimental fish-eye lens, a lens that became popular in the following years. This may be the photo that most captures the feeling of being underwater, and the feeling of water pressure, more than any other photo I've ever seen. The corresponding article on Cay Sal has some beautiful (though old-fashioned quality) color photos. I also liked the color photos that were examples of close-up photography, the photo of the buxom lady in the Koko Head article, the full-page photo of the sling spearfisherman over elkhorn coral, and the split-image full-page dive boat photo with the beautiful blue Kodacolor hue. This was the issue where Paul Tzimoulis became editor, and his spirted influence already seemed evident. |
Another possibility is that SDM should have been more insightful about what readers wanted, and given it to them. Although SDM made a definite effort in the 1990s to give the readers what they wanted, somehow it must have failed, maybe due to lack of insight. Where insight comes in is that readers won't always know or tell you what it is they really want. Possibly this is where editor Paul Tzimoulis' strength lie: maybe he was tuned into what people really wanted. Another possibility is that SDM had been so equipment focused for so long that readers couldn't mentally put SDM into a new category even when SDM attempted to change.
As to what modern readers want from a scuba magazine, I really don't know. I have to admit that even I disliked SDM from the '80s on because I felt it had lost its soul and had become too focused on things that didn't relate to the heart of the attraction of diving. The 1960s optimism of science and living in undersea habitats, the mystery of exploration, and the cozy club-like comraderie of nature lovers had been replaced by commercialism. The attractive sexy ads of the '60s and '70s had largely gone away, too, possibly because SDM had a female editor in an age of sexual conservatism, and was receiving complaints from women about the sexual content of SDM articles. What resulted was a bland, overly censored, overly commerical magazine that no longer fired my imagination or evoked my enthusiasm.
I also believe that public optimism is falling in recent decades due to the nature of modern politics-- ecology is at least as important an issue as it was in the 1970s, but now everybody knows that you can't fight big government and big business, and that the environment is getting progressively worse, with no end in sight. We're therefore forced to ignore important environmental issues but to keep on buying the latest dive gear--a sad paradox. (Why buy dive gear if there's nothing to look at down there anymore?) Similarly, government regulations and a hostile government attitude discourage people from starting new countries underwater, or manning personal submarines that would lead to personal freedom, or from treasure hunting for profit. Because of the widespread destruction of the underwater environment, spearfishing is either banned or discouraged in many places, and shelling is often illegal, thereby destroying two more of the oldest motivations for diving. At the same time, knowledge of the seas has increased greatly since the 1960s. Like science, undersea exploration is increasingly coming into the domain of organizations with expensive equipment that the average person cannot afford: JIM suits, deep sea submersibles, remote operated vehicles, etc. Just as scientists can no longer make major discoveries with homemade equipment, scuba explorers can no longer make major discoveries with just a set of tanks. Therefore one more motivatation for diving is dying. Collectively I believe all this adds up to a lack of motivation and enthusiasm, which makes it hard for a magazine to tap the same spirit of adventure as Paul Tzimoulis once did.
In some sense, Paul Tzimoulis could have been the soul of SDM, just as Walt Disney was the soul of Disneyland, and it may not have been a coincidence that SDM entered hard times just as Tzimoulis left as its editor in 1998. Or that SDM died six months after Tzimoulis died.
Later SDM issues had other minor drawbacks, too, like the absence of full-page color photos, or the absence of photos that one could clip or scan-- most photos in the later issues were partially obscured with writing. Possibly another drawback was the "Best Of" mentality. As one author noted, this modern era is obsessed with the "10 Best Of" type articles, such as the 10 best beaches, the 10 best dive spots, or the 10 best regulators. The result of this is that products and places that aren't in the top ten are implied to be less desirable, when in reality it is likely that those less popular places have fewer crowds or more interesting topside natural features, and that those products have more character and more collectibility value. Therefore the aspect of novelty and interest took a hit with this practice. We've become a society who would rather eat at a Denny's than at Martha's Country Kitchen. The '60s interest in discovering unusual, little known, out-of-the-way places seems to have disappeared. Another drawback was there were fewer articles and features about science and nature in SDM in recent decades, which maybe reflected the recent "dumbing down" of our society and demise of high quality education in the United States.
To me, there are deeper, ominous tones to the demise of SDM. SDM was a survivor, and known for reflecting the Zeitgeist of whatever era in which it found itself. Could its complete failure in the 2000s be an ominous reflection of the inability of anything to survive long under modern conditions? Its demise also coincided with it focusing on equipment and commercialism-- could this be evidence that when money is treated as the ultimate good that failure will inevitably result? Similarly, its censorship could also be an indication that modern sexual attitudes are not viable-- that maybe everybody wants to see sexy photos but everyone publically denies this, so when puritanism is actually implemented in a magazine, nobody wants to look at it, and it fails. Collectively all this evidence suggests that everything about this modern era-- sexual hypocrisy, materialistic values, hostile and unresponsive politics, lack of interest in science-- will eventually result in the complete failure of our society. Skin Diver could have been a miniature model of how the larger system works. Maybe the demise of Skin Diver is a warning of bigger catastrophes yet to come if we don't establish realistic, viable foundations.
In my impressionable male adolescence--before, during, and after the time I took a diving certification course in 1970-- Skin Diver was an important part of my life and formed a beautiful backdrop to my life in that era. Exotic travel destinations, beautiful underwater photography, sexy ladies, science and exploration, cool gadgetry, practical information, interesting ideas--it was all there in SDM. My extreme enthusiasm over my first issues by subscription in 1968, combined with that being an impressionable and very happy era for me, made every issue emotionally charged and unforgettable. I used to recite technical facts and stories I'd read in this magazine, and more secretively, it was my main source of pictures of ladies in swimsuits when I was young. Decades later I could still remember specific articles and article titles, especially about the technical aspects of underwater photography. Nearly every advertisement, photo, and topic from the issues of that era now carry strong memories and positive associations for me. Even objectively, the 1960s and 1970s were probably the "golden age" of diving.
In the process of collecting SDM issues new and old, I needed to make lists of issues I already owned, and I also needed cross-references to articles and ads I often looked up, and also wanted the ranges that certain advertisements were run so as to know which issues I had seen or owned before. Eventually I decided to put many of my lists and scans online for others to use, the result of which is this site.
These magazine issues have value beyond nostalgia. They documented the history of diving in a consistent manner for five decades. Vintage equipment enthusiasts, especially vintage dive watch collectors, find them desirable and a valuable source of information about which equipment existed when, and what it was like.
Another part of my motivation for this site is that there has been no attempt anywhere else to summarize this magazine, to my knowledge. More popular magazines of general interest like National Geographic and Life have published and unpublished sources for summaries and cover photos, but maybe because the audience for Skin Diver was more limited, no such analogous source for SDM exists, to my knowledge. I hope and expect this site will be useful to a lot of people for many different reasons.
Updated: June 13, 2007
