Ciao, I'm Edoardo. I shoot, I write, and I ride.

I tell stories through outdoor photography — the kind that unfold on two wheels, on dusty roads, over distances most people would rather drive. Cycling adventures aren’t just my subject; they’re my way of moving through the world, and I ride the same gravel and ultra-distance routes I end up covering as a photographer.

If there’s one thread running underneath everything I do, it’s this: I’ve spent my life studying, and living, displacement. My PhD — officially in philosophy, in practice somewhere between philosophy, history, and political thought — was on the invention of American national identity before the Civil War, seen through a German Romantic revolutionary who fled to the US and reinvented himself as a professor of politics, history, and law. It’s a story about being an outsider who has to build a new identity from scratch, in a new place, with no map for how to do it. I didn’t choose that topic by accident. By the time I was writing it, I’d already lived it a few times over: a degree in Torino, a few years teaching sailing and studying political philosophy on the French Riviera, archival research stints in Los Angeles and Pasadena, months moving up and down the American East Coast — Washington DC, Boston, New York, Baltimore, South Carolina — chasing documents and fellowships, conferences in Scotland, Ireland, France, and Italy along the way, before finishing the same PhD, cross-registered, at the Sorbonne.

Chasing riders across unfamiliar countries turns out to draw on exactly the same instinct: you show up somewhere you don’t fully belong yet, you watch closely, and you try to find the story before you understand the place. [If that connection interests you, the Philo/photo section of the Journal is where I actually put the two disciplines in direct conversation.]

Teaching runs even further back than the PhD. I’ve been on the water since I was ten — always on a catamaran, a Hobie Cat 15 or 16 — and started as a sailing instructor’s assistant at sixteen, then a full instructor at twenty, teaching teenagers and adults alike, mostly at a leisurely, unhurried level rather than a competitive one. In 2013 I stepped briefly into the other end of it: second place in the Mediterranean Cup on an IMX40, one of the best weeks of my life, followed by a full month cruising the Mediterranean on a 1963 wooden ketch, originally built for solo round-the-world sailing. These days it’s a high-school classroom, history and philosophy, rather than a boat — but the job hasn’t really changed: read the room, explain clearly, and know when to let someone figure it out themselves. That’s exactly what shows up when I run a talk or a hands-on session [see Live] — it’s not a departure from the day job, it’s the same one, on a different subject.

Photography, when I’m honest about it, is just my excuse to keep doing all of this at once — to go somewhere unfamiliar, pay close attention, and come back with something true. Some of that work ends up published elsewhere too [see On paper].

These days home is Turin, alongside Anna and our two very lively little girls who keep me a lot more grounded than the long solo stretches of an ultra-race might suggest.