Carlo Borlenghi, who elevated yacht racing photography into an art form, shooting sailboats from startling angles and framing breathtaking compositions of sea and sky, died on Aug. 3 in Lecco, Italy. He was 70.
His death, at a hospital, was caused by an abdominal infection, his wife, Alessandra Tanghetti, said. The couple lived on Lake Como, in Bellano, where Mr. Borlenghi was born and first photographed friends in sailboat races.
He would go on to spend four decades shooting yachting’s top competitions, including the America’s Cup and the Whitbread Round the World Race (now the Ocean Race), and would be recognized as one of the world’s finest photographers of sailboat races, a rarefied niche in which he had few peers.
A yacht is often just a small detail in a Borlenghi image, a trace of human artifice in a panorama of heavy cloud banks, swirling turquoise ocean, fire-hose sprays of water and clusters of seabirds.
“He was always thinking of images, not just boats,” Guy Gurney, a photographer who shot races with Mr. Borlenghi beginning in the 1980s, said in an interview. “Carlo just got better and better. Suddenly he was producing art, when the rest of us were just illustrating.”
Mr. Borlenghi shot one race’s crowded start from the viewpoint of a lighthouse lantern room, a large Fresnel lens visible in the foreground. He captured a heeled-over yacht crashing through the waves from a vantage point on the waterline, the boat nearly obscured by spindrift.
And although he did not know how to swim, he never hesitated to climb onto one of the small chase boats used by photographers or to board a helicopter to get a bird’s-eye view. He understood racing tactics as if he were at the helm of one of the boats he photographed.
“He knew where the pressure would build on a start line, when the spray would explode from a bow, when a helmsman’s glance revealed victory or defeat,” Magnus Wheatley, a sailing historian, wrote after Mr. Borlenghi’s death. “His images carried movement, atmosphere and humanity in equal measure.”
Mr. Borlenghi was one of a handful of media jet-setters who dominated coverage of international yachting, especially the America’s Cup, as boats evolved from deep-keeled 12-Meter sloops to barely-in-the-water hydrofoils resembling racecars.
Not every day on the water produced pulse-pounding action. A monthslong America’s Cup competition included plenty of tedious moments when racing was abandoned for lack of wind. Mr. Borlenghi still found ways to frame an imaginative image, Sharon Green, a sailing photographer who worked alongside him, recalled in an interview.
“In challenging situations — bad weather or no wind or no light,” she said, “I think, ‘What would Carlo do?’”
Carlo Borlenghi was born on July 10, 1956, in Bellano, a small town on the eastern side of Lake Como, to Andrea and Rosa (Conforti) Borlenghi. His father owned a multigenerational plumbing business that he hoped his son would take over one day.
Instead, Carlo developed a passion for photography. He would try to sell the photos he shot of races on Lake Como to the sailboats’ crew members, who were his friends. One day, a journalist who saw those images invited him to meet the editors of Uomo Mare, a boating magazine based in Milan. The magazine eventually sent him on assignments covering regattas around the world.
In addition to doing photojournalism, Mr. Borlenghi became the in-house photographer for Italy’s entries in the America’s Cup, starting in 1983 with the yacht Azzurra in Newport, R.I. He went on to document the campaigns of multiple iterations of America’s Cup boats christened Luna Rossa that were owned by Patrizio Bertelli, the chief executive of Prada, from 2000 in Auckland, New Zealand, through 2024 in Barcelona, Spain.
In 1989, Mr. Borlenghi founded his own photographic agency, Sea & See Italia. More recently, his work was represented by Studio Borlenghi, which he ran with Ms. Tanghetti, whom he married in 1994.
In addition to her, he is survived by his mother and a brother, Luciano.
During the Covid pandemic, Mr. Borlenghi improvised a studio in the middle of Bellano and invited each of the town’s residents to sit for a portrait. He photographed 1,800 people and published a book of those portraits, “Il Ritratto di Bellano,” in 2022.
Mr. Gurney, his fellow photographer, recalled how Mr. Borlenghi was constantly searching for fresh material. At an America’s Cup regatta in the 1990s, he said, one of the racing teams announced a news conference to unveil a new keel, an event of minimal interest. Mr. Borlenghi’s attention was soon wandering.
“I looked around and there was Carlo: He’d gone away from the rest of us and was outside taking a picture of a man holding his bicycle,” Mr. Gurney said. “The man was standing by a tree in the most beautiful light. I hadn’t even noticed. There was no boat in the picture.”
He added, “Carlo always had his eyes open for something else going on.”
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