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.

I didn’t grow among bikes, though. If there’s one thread running underneath everything I do, it’s displacement: I’ve spent my life studying, and living it somehow. 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 – It resounded in some ways with my own trajectory. A degree in Torino, a few years teaching sailing and studying political philosophy on the French Riviera, archival research stints between Los Angeles and various foundations on the East Coast — chasing documents and fellowships, conferences in Scotland, Ireland, France, and my own Italy along the way, before finishing the same PhD, cross-registered, at the Sorbonne. And shooting cyclist stuff in the meantime. 

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.

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: Mediterranean Cup on an IMX40,  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.

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.