Because of her last name, Paola Marzotto was destined to be a member of the Italian elite. Her grandfather, the businessman Gaetano Marzotto, frequented the Pirelli and Olivetti circle; Her mother, the model Marta Marzotto, organized parties at the Palazzo Stucchi in Portogruaro and her daughter, Beatrice Borromeo, is Carolina de Monaco’s in-law. But Marzotto traded charity galas for mountains and glaciers, cultivated her passion for photography, and dedicated himself to the environmental fight.
The word routine does not exist in his vocabulary. For her, no day is the same as the other, although she does admit to being a morning person. “As the Italians say, Il mattino ha l’oro in bocca (The early bird catches the worm)â€, she acknowledges, adding that although she has great friends, she is “zero socialâ€, reserved and a born fighter.
The artist has made it her mission to raise awareness about the climate crisis through her photographs and this May she brings to Madrid, My Giverny, painting with light, a retrospective dedicated to the artistic photography of water lilies linked to Claude Monet. “I wasn’t looking to be inspired by him, but I was looking to show something through a form of active contemplation, substituting the brush for the camera,” he stresses about her work, which can be seen at the Higher Technical School of Mining and Energy Engineers until may 31.
Photography is for her a means of emotional communication, “the most appropriate to communicate the beauty of Mother Nature”, with which she feels deeply connected. Marzotto’s first camera was a Nikon and her muse was her late sister Annalisa. “I photographed her non-stop,” she recalls.
He became a professional in the world of photography in a self-taught way at the age of 20 and came to photograph large projects, such as the filming of Apocalypse Now (1979). “It was quite an adventure. We would fly to the set from Manila with military helicopters and the day they shot the famous scene of the Ride of the Valkyries I was behind Coppola and Storaroâ€, she proudly recalls.
Although she has always been connected to preserving the environment — she took her children to clean the beaches of Sardinia in the 1980s — her “bath of conscienceâ€, as she describes it, came in 2020. The advice of her son Carlo took her to Antarctica, where she fell in love with the imposing white desert and dedicated an exhibition to it. The state of that landscape melting away from her left her in shock: “I never would have thought that disaster was so close.” In fact, she writes to us from there, about the icebreaker of the Argentine Navy, the Admiral Irizar, to capture with her lens the natural beauty of the home that little by little we are destroying. “Only young people listen to the warnings of scientists, a change in general consciousness is crucial,” she says.
