Kos Evans was a meme before memes existed: a petite blonde woman with an indefatigable smile, typically found hanging upside down from the top of a 200-foot mast with a long-lens camera in her hands. “All in a day’s work,” one might caption the scenes. For 40 years, Evans has been synonymous with yachting and action photography, the go-to choice to capture an America’s Cup final or the opening sequence of a Bond movie. She’s been described as having the “adventurous spirit of a stuntwoman and the eye of an artist”, an apt line for a photographer who loves a challenge, be it finding stillness from the bow of a powerboat or astride a horse.
“When you have a camera in front of your face, you feel immortal,” Evans tells me from her mortal dwellings in West Sussex, about 40 minutes outside London. “I’m always trying to get a different angle, to think outside the box.” Nowadays, she’s playing with new materials – provided by celebrity collaborators – for her fine art: Evans’ exhibition ‘Rock & Royals’ debuted during Monaco Classic Week in September 2025, at the Yacht Club de Monaco. A collection of roughly a dozen images handprinted onto heritage yacht sails, the unique canvases were donated by the likes of King Juan Carlos of Spain (“I’ve got him down as ‘King’ in my phone!”), the late Duke of Edinburgh via The Royal Yacht Britannia Trust, and Pete Townshend, guitar-smashing icon of The Who.
Evans’ idea started with a simple request: “Do you have an old sail you’re throwing out?” The query spread like a gale-force wind to the ears of friends of friends from the America’s Cup circuit. Soon she was chatting with Jim Hartley, owner of Ratsey & Lapthorn, the world’s oldest sail loft (founded in 1790), about the original foresail used in 1962 by President John F. Kennedy on his favourite yacht, Manitou. “Do what you want with it,” Evans recalls being told by Hartley, a somewhat mind-boggling offer that became The Floating White House, a pop art–inspired study of the late President paired with the sail’s original “62”.
For nearly three years, Evans excavated sails and stories from eager participants. Over dinner with Townshend, she received the promise of sails from his classic yacht, Serenade, that would become The Last Serenade. Evans, in her exhibition notes, describes how she imagined Townshend’s “iconic moment of destruction” – an image of the rocker smashing his guitar into the steel hull of a yacht, rather than onto a concert stage – as the “untamed spirit of rock” finding peaceful silence at sea.
‘Rock & Royals’ has a spirit of renewal, with worn and stained sails destined for the rubbish pile being reborn as transformative art, whose $48,000 in proceeds – nearly $100k in matching funds – went to the conservation initiative Oceans Without Borders. “I’ve worked on the ocean for 40 years,” says Evans. “I’ve seen the degradation of it.” She plans to continue this reclamation into 2026 with exhibitions in New York City and Nantucket. “I’ve never really cracked America with my art,” Evans adds, despite being known globally for her equestrian photography, film and magazine work.
It’s been a few decades since Evans has dangled from a mast in pursuit of that perfect shot – “you know, drones”, she says with a laugh. Though she recalls a more personal pause, early into motherhood, when she went up a mast and came down 30 minutes later, legs shaking and stomach roiling. “I don’t really remember being particularly frightened,” she says. More like: “When you have a child, you suddenly go, oh, I don’t need to be in a dangerous place.” Yet now that her children are grown, she’s back to looking for that adrenaline rush – as that “crazy woman” riding her horse in a storm.
