Eight Bells - Carlo Borlenghi
Two of my favourite things in life are the aesthetics of sailing boats and the creatively captured image. So when someone comes along who has the ability to combine the two in a way that has been unmatched for decades, then I should pay my respects.
All Images by Carlo Borlenghi
Carlo Borlenghi died on the night of August 2nd, at home in Bellano, the small town on Lake Como where he'd been born seventy years earlier. He's survived by his wife, Alessandra, and by a strange, sprawling family of sailors, editors, and old friends who never quite stopped thinking of him as one of their own crew.
Here's the thing people who worked with him always brought up first: Carlo couldn't swim. A man who spent much of his life leaning out of helicopters over open water, chasing the magic moment, never once felt safe in the sea itself. He didn't hide that fear — he just kept going out, year after year, and somewhere along the way decided the fear was actually useful. He used to say it was probably why his photos of the sea looked different from everyone else's: he respected the water in a way people who could swim never quite had to. it also led to him developing his own particular style of shooting underwater, one that plenty of photographers spent years trying to copy.
He started small, the way most people do. As a teenager on Lake Como he'd photograph his friends racing dinghies, nothing more ambitious than that. Then in his early twenties an Italian sailing magazine sent him to Alassio to shoot a regatta, and that was more or less it — he was hooked on the open sea, both terrified and thrilled. Over the next four decades he ended up behind the lens for nearly everything that mattered in the sport: the America's Cup, over and over, across different boats and different eras, eventually as the event's own official photographer; the Whitbread and Volvo Ocean Races, and our own Sydney Hobart. In 1989 he started his own agency, Sea&See, mostly so he could keep working the way he wanted to work. Talking about his career as a list-of-achievements way was never really the point with Carlo, and it would have annoyed him. He was famously not someone who liked talking about himself.
People describe him as quiet in a way that could feel a bit standoffish until you got to know him — not cold exactly, just someone who didn't waste words. Underneath that he was sharp with a dry humour, but fanatically disciplined about his work. He'd rather let a photograph speak for him than explain himself, which is probably why so many people who knew him for years still describe him as a bit of a mystery. But he was also, known to be generous and quick to encourage younger photographers starting out. And after months on the road — helicopters, rubber dinghies, airport after airport — he'd come home to Bellano and just fish for a few days. Then, restless, he'd already be thinking about the next regatta and the next place to stand where nobody else had thought to look.