January / February 2025

Boats, People, ACTION

The yachting photography of John S. Johnston

Stan Grayson

Johnston captured several amazing photographs of the big catboat MARY in heavy weather. The yacht’s sail is both reefed and scandalized, her heavy boom supported by the topping lift, a vital piece of rigging on a catboat. Enlarging the photo shows MARY’s sail attaches to the mast using a track rather than mast hoops (see page 80), and she has elegant laid decks. The boat, which looks to be about 28' long, was designed by Philip R. “Phip” Elsworth of Bayonne, New Jersey, and built in 1893 at Mariner’s Harbor, Staten Island, by L.N. Tonn.

In 1845, at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, a memorial was unveiled commemorating the loss, a decade earlier in Florida, of Major Francis Dade and some 100 soldiers during the second Seminole War. Although the memorial was later moved, it originally overlooked the Hudson River. That is where the photographer John S. Johnston found it sometime around 1890.

After positioning his 8″ × 10″ view camera on its tripod, Johnston framed the monument with trees and the far-shore hills. Then he waited until just the right moment and, when a Hudson River schooner sailed into what he judged to be the perfect spot, he clicked the shutter. The result was typical of Johnston’s work: a beautifully composed image with an object in motion but rendered clearly.

Photographs of monuments, buildings, bridges, and scenery in New York, Boston, Québec, and Puerto Rico were among Johnston’s best-known subjects. However, during a comparatively brief, roughly 14-year career, he also found a market for images of ocean liners, naval vessels, and boating subjects ranging from yacht clubs to dories and catboats, from steam yachts and racing yachts of many classes to AMERICA’s Cup contestants.

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