Keeping watch for the Milky Way
High-altitude nights in the Dolomites, where Edoardo Brotto's photographs are born, and sometimes his music too
There is an hour, in the mountains, when the world goes dark. The last lights in the valleys go out, the wind drops, the snow stops creaking. That is when the sky begins to fill.
Edoardo has spent countless nights like this, high among the Alpine peaks, keeping watch until the Milky Way arches over the spires of the Dolomites. Hours of cold and silence for a few moments of the right light.
Photographing the night sky asks for the same virtues as composing: patience, memory, a clear idea of what you are looking for before you find it. The Milky Way must be waited for. You study the lunar calendar, you calculate with apps where and when the galaxy will rise above the horizon, you scout by day to find the right rock. Where exactly remains a secret.
And then there are the nights that do not go as planned. Storms breaking open at dawn, distant lightning, mists rising from the valleys. Many of the most intense images are born right there.
From photography to music
The two arts speak to each other. The snow-covered Dolomites, relived in memories and photographs, accompanied the birth of Siberian Blizzard, together with the memory of a blizzard at 3,000 metres. And some works found their final form far from the piano, on ocean cliffs, facing a storm front at sunset.
It is no coincidence that his most recent music is called The Night Suite. Red Sprites takes its name from the crimson flashes that dance above thunderstorms, rare and almost invisible to the naked eye: Edoardo has seen them with his own eyes. Tolls of the Northern Sky evokes the bells of a northern sky. Those who know his photographs recognise the same nights in those titles.
His photographic work earned him a place among the finalists of the Sony World Photography Awards in 2011 and exhibitions at Somerset House in London and Kinneksbond in Luxembourg. The Starscapes, Alps, Wildlife, North and Visions series gather more than a hundred images.