The Press: Salt-Water Photographer

Like an eager duck bobbing after great white swans, a venerable, 33-ft. cabin cruiser named Foto last week followed the four sleek 12-meter yachts sailing over the course near Newport, R.I. Skittering across the yachts’ bows, hovering a few yards off their lee rails, Foto followed every tack and tactic of the observation trials that will help select the boat to defend the America’s Cup against the British in September.

But no blue-jacketed racing official waved the intruding cruiser off the course, no skipper turned to bellow. Everyone knew that Foto was commanded by Morris (“Rosy”) Rosenfeld of City Island, N.Y., the world’s No. 1 marine photographer.* After more than 60 years of shooting boats, Rosy knew just how close to get to the race without bothering the skippers. He alone had full freedom of the course, while his landlubber rivals in other boats scrambled for inferior sites.

Composition, Clarity. Short and sun-bronzed, an unlit cigar clenched in the corner of his mouth, Rosy patrols a pitching deck with sure-footed agility that belies his 73 years. He cradles a battered Speed Graphic in his left arm, and from time to time he squints through the range finder, rises on his toes to kill the vibration of the 150-h.p. engine, waits for a wave to lift him and his target simultaneously, then snaps his shutter with a small cable release.

By such concentration, Rosy has built up a collection of some 250,000 pictures, covering every major racing event since Sir Thomas Lipton went to the U.S. from England in 1899 for the first of five unsuccessful tries at the America’s Cup. Rosy’s black-and-white pictures have a style that any yachtsman can spot at a glance: arresting composition, sharp clarity, and most important, an uncanny projection of the yacht’s personality. “A yacht photographer must understand the character of a boat—he must see her perform,” he explains. “It is my job to do justice to the designer’s creation.”

Rosy has been photographing ships since he was a twelve-year-old on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. With five other boys, he raised $1.25 to buy a Premo 4-by-5 camera from a pawnshop. When it came his turn to use it, he took a picture of a square-rigger moored off Manhattan’s South Street. The shot won $5 in a photo contest, and when Rosy quit day school a year later to help support his family, he turned naturally to photography. He became a hustling freelancer who got a beat on the Baltimore fire of 1904 by driving a farmer’s wagon through police lines. The next year he was pool photographer at Teddy Roosevelt’s Russo-Japanese peace conference in Portsmouth, N.H. “You really had to push to get shots in those days,” recalls Rosy. “The other guys would pull your slides or put chewing gum on your lenses.”

“Such a Compulsion.” Boats were always Rosy’s favorite target, but he did not always have his present preferred status; J. P. Morgan once smashed Rosy’s camera with a cane when Rosy tried to sneak a shot of the old yachtsman coming ashore from his famed Corsair. Photographing yachts in all kinds of weather, Rosy has hung by one hand from a halyard and thudded his skull against Foto’s deck, but has never gone overboard.

He works with his three sons—Dave, 51, Stan, 45, and Bill, 39—one of whom is at the helm while the others help Rosy take pictures. He keeps about ten cameras in a special frame on top of the engine hatch, garners up to 500 negatives on a good day. Every picture taken by him or his sons bears the same credit line: Morris Rosenfeld. Rosy’s pictures bring as much as $5,000 each. They often settle fouling claims for bedeviled racing officials, and solve design problems for stumped yacht architects.

“I don’t know why I have such a compulsion to take pictures of boats,” says Rosy Rosenfeld, a sailors’ delight of a marine photographer. “Water and sky fascinate me. I have to take them.”

* For a report on the Newport trials and a sample of Rosy’s latest work, see SPORT.