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THE DISCREET CHARM OF
THE DIVING PHOTOGRAPHER
Like most of the divers I have ever met, I'm no oil painting. My body is a temple, of course. But decades of rampant abuse have reduced it to The Temple Of Doom.
We owe it to ourselves to be like the sharks: perfect examples of our species, our exquisitely-honed musculature providing an awesome power that we express with consummate, breathtaking grace.
So why is your average diver a pot-bellied, snaggle-toothed piss artist with an aggravated hernia for whom a day without thirty Marlboro and six pints of Stella is the very definition of Hell?
I think it might be a British thing. If you're bent on braving the icy blackness of our waters, you first need to develop an insulating layer of blubber. And I suppose that once you've taken that particular page out of the walrus's book, the flatulence and the halitosis follow.
Perhaps I'm being unfair. It has been known. But when I look at the front cover of Diver, it's hard to relate the svelte, seductive lines of the semi-naked model, cavorting in her Caribbean grotto, to Keith the branch instructor as he slithers across the boat tube like some snorting, mutant sea cucumber.
Where do they find these mesmerising female divers? I work in advertising, so I spend my days pestered by swarms of lissom, long-limbed supermodels. (It gets boring, believe it or not, but I suppose it still beats being the ledger clerk at a wholesale stationer's.)
Almost without exception, these heart-stopping human baubles have no interests beyond pouting and smouldering and spreading vicious rumours about each other over salads so low-cal as to be invisible to the naked eye. Being Unbelievably Lovely requires a dedication that would have made Mother Theresa look like a dizzy dilettante.
In the world of the professional beauty, pools are for lying by, not swimming in. Even Lesson One of the most sedate diving course would wreck the pH balance of her skin, break her nails and reduce her hair to the consistency of a snakelocks anemone with split ends.
Besides, were she to be momentarily diverted by anything beyond the boundaries of her own, perfect body, her insurers would soon put the mockers on it.
And yet Bantin seems to have no difficulty persuading an apparently endless succession of babes to get their kit off and disport themselves among the gorgonia in the planet's most sumptuous dive locations.
It's a mystery to compare with the virgin birth.
Perhaps he doesn't really photograph them at all. Perhaps he employs the sophisticated techniques of digital image manipulation to superimpose diving equipment onto the women, then the women onto subterranean scenes.
Knowing Bantin, however, I doubt it. It's more likely that he locates his young, innocent victims on remote tropical islands, untainted by the corrupting tentacles of the media. He brings to bear his legendary charm, dazzles them with promises of international celebrity, instructs them in the secret, submarine arts - then casually delivers the time-honoured coup de grace of the photographer: "Now, if you could just slip yer top off, love..."
Before he landed The Best Job In The World, Bantin worked, like me, in advertising. He learned his trade among the languid, mini-skirted courtesans of Chelsea and Knightsbridge.
His silver-tongued seduction techniques, honed on Twiggy and her imitators, can whisk the tank top off an eighteen year-old ingenue in ten seconds flat. In the words of the master himself: it's dirty work, but someone has to do it.
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