Cicloreporter – sport photography and storytelling

Industry: a quick detour

Efrezet — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 14:48:40 +0000

Industry and transportation: a quick detour away from cycling.

Every good story begins with a displacement of some kind: a person in an unfamiliar place, an object out of context, a journey. Anything that isn’t static, anything that breaks the status quo.

That’s probably why bicycles are an inexhaustible source of good stories. People, travels, encounters.

For the same reason, however, we can look for stories almost anywhere, wherever there is displacement. What changes from one context to another is how you find them and bring them out, of course. But they are there, that’s for sure.

Then there’s a second thing: a fascination with major infrastructure. Trains, airports, ports, even bus stations and petrol stations. Maybe it comes from my grandfather, who designed some of these big concrete structures all over Italy.

Maybe it’s the romantic sublime that blinds you with the incommensurable power of the nature, who knows. Either way, the pull is instinctive.

Infrastructure and stories

Put the two together, and the connection is almost obvious. A major piece of infrastructure is usually a machine for displacement. A station exists so people can leave and arrive, a port so that whatever never stays still can pass through, a petrol station so that anyone can keep going. These are places built to be crossed, and that is exactly why they are full of stories, big and small, sometimes dramatic.

Rotterdam harbors

Freight train

Outskirts

Wind turbines

History and stories

Perhaps for this reason, some of the best stories I recall come from my dear friend David: retiree from the Bureau of Land Management in California and Nevada, he knows everything about the water infrastructure that caused so much trouble in the valleys across XX century. From lakes disappearing to the sabotages by the native tribes; from the building of dams to the building of cold-war bunkers. No secrets for him from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, and he was happy to share his knowledge during our rides around Pasadena and the Owen Valley. Thanks to his anecdotes and stories, I could picture the complex history of that region a lot better.

Of course my work so far is not about this. However, while travelling (by bike or not), you always stumble upon these things. And my instinct pushed me to work with that.

These photographs were made without a commission or a brief. They are the view of someone who stops to look at the places usually neglected, because that is usually where the story begins.

Freight train

When they ask you if you want to hop on and take photos on a freight train, departing at dawn and arriving at the sea, you don’t say no. You can only say thank you, wake up in the middle of the night, head to the train depot, and then photograph everything you can.

And so I did. As you can imagine, I was quite nervous, especially after spending lots of words about “turning constraints into narrative keys, (ITA)” using Paul Fusco and his marvelous Funeral Train as an example.

My friend David, with whom I shared a brief but intense chapter of life in Pasadena, had worked as a young man on the trains of the Santa Fe Railroad, which also ran through his hometown of Topeka. While I was living in California, we traveled several times by train, heading to New Mexico and to San Francisco. It was an experience with an unmistakable Old Wild West flavor—and at about the same average speed as back then.

So, first of all, a few photos of our journeys. At the time, I had just started both photographing and ultracycling, taking advantage of the “bachelor lifestyle” I was living during that period.

Back to our freight train adventure.

I didn’t set any specific goals for myself, other than to have fun and experiment. I was sure that I wanted to take photos on a freight train, not of a freight train. And maybe practicing double exposures, since I was recently captivated by them after seeing photos from a cycling shoot in a train yard in Los Angeles. What a coincidence, huh?

The day actually begins in the middle of the night, with some logistical preparations in a biting cold, while the sky slowly lightens with the dawn.

Then comes the actual departure: checks, paperwork, more checks, communications, even more checks, and finally we head east, toward the sun peeking over the horizon. From that moment on, we stay in the cab—a “square” about two meters wide and slightly less deep. There are two chairs, one for the driver and one for the assistant; if there are three of us, we take turns, though standing forces me to move around and look for different angles.

Checklist

Monviso

On the track

From there, I focus on capturing more of the inside than the outside, taking advantage of moments when the elements of the landscape and the morning light combine to create intriguing plays of light. For several hours, I am able to explore the movements of the train operators, their work routines, and a few unexpected events that brought the day to life.

Gear

I chose to use my usual combo, OM1.II and the EM1.III, with a combination of lenses:

Zuiko 7-14mm 2.8 PRO
Lumix 35-100mm 2.8 OIS II
Zuiko 17mm 1.2 PRO
Zuiko 45mm 1.2 PRO

I purposely left home the classic 12-40 2.8, which would have been enough fore 90% of the shots, to challenge myself a bit about finding interesting angles. I knew I would use the 7-14 only in the cabin (I am not a fan of ultrawide pictures), and the zoom mainly in the yard; so the most of the 800 pics I shot were with the two PRO prime lenses. I love the 17, and the 45, although not an easy lens, it’s really hard to replace when you need it.

Industry: a quick detour

Where to find interesting stories? Quick answer: where things and people are on the move.

Alternative Altitude Alps

A 400km, 14.000mt offroad bikepacking route. Why did we think that was a good thing?

Turning constraints into narrative keys: Paul Fusco’s Kennedy’s Funeral Train [1968]

The italian saying is "fare di necessità virtù": a classic reportage and what it can teach us about cycling photography

How does Memory work? 4 ideas for cycling storytelling inspired by Wim Wenders’ “Once” [1993]

A book of simple pictures (and four simple ideas) showing us how memory works.

Alternative Altitude Alps

Efrezet — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 17:53:27 +0000

Alternative Altitude Alps: a bikepacking route

I jumped right at it as soon as Luigi told me his idea. A new bikepacking route on the high roads near home, our usual playground. The challenge? Combining adventure and accessibility; landscapes and culture. A bikepacking route through the Western Alps, linking high mountain passes, old military roads, forgotten corners and the valleys in between.

Two years later, Alternative Altitude Alps is born. We chose the name only after trying the whole route: despite being very familar with these roads, we didn’t know the feelings they would spark once combined in one long stretch.

400 km · 14,000 m elevation gain · Italy & France · 6–11 days

The route starts and finishes in the Susa Valley and loops roughly around Mount Chaberton, crossing the Italian and French Alps along a deliberately varied combination of dirt roads, mountain tracks and paved valley roads.

But the route is not really about collecting passes. It’s more about everything that connects them.

What

We built Alternative Altitude Alps around a simple question: what if the best parts of an Alpine bikepacking route weren’t only the obvious ones?

There are plenty of spectacular military roads and famous climbs in the Alps. Connecting them is relatively easy. The harder — and more interesting — part is deciding what happens between one highlight and the next.

So we spent a lot of time scouting.

The result is a route of around 400 km and 14,000 metres of climbing, connecting major Alpine landmarks with quieter roads, old military tracks, small villages, lakes, forts, cafés and the people who still live in these valleys.

The route is demanding, especially because of the elevation gain, and the terrain is generally challenging. There is only one significant hike-a-bike section, lasting around two hours.

But difficulty was never the point.

When and where

The route is best ridden from late June to October, depending on the year.

At the beginning of the season, the high passes are accessible only once the snow has melted. At the other end, the season lasts until the first significant snowfall.

As always in the Alps, conditions can change quickly, so these dates should be considered a guide rather than a guarantee.

The route starts in Susa, Italy, and crosses the Western Alps between Italy and France.

Along the way it reaches places such as Sommeiller, Rochemolles, Val Clarée, Lac Rond, Lac Grand Ban, Galibier, Briançon, Monti della Luna, Cesana and Salbertrand, while passing countless smaller places that would probably never make it onto a conventional Alpine itinerary.

There are military forts and roads dating mainly from the 20th century, high-altitude lakes and valleys, shepherds moving with their animals, hikers from all over Europe, road cyclists on famous passes — and plenty of places where the most important thing on the itinerary is simply stopping for coffee.

How

The route on komoot

The route is deliberately flexible and scalable. We recommend allowing at least six days to ride the complete route. Nine days is probably the sweet spot for enjoying it properly, while 10–11 days makes for a much more relaxed journey.

But there is no single correct way to ride it.

The route can be shortened, split differently or adjusted according to your pace, weather and legs. Train stations in the valleys make access and exit relatively straightforward, while most of the major climbs can be tackled independently, one at a time.

And when the weather turns — because at some point it probably will — you can usually drop back down into the valley.

We deliberately worked on this aspect of the route. Mountains already provide enough variables without adding unnecessary logistical problems.

Accommodation and resupply are available throughout most of the route, with only a couple of longer stretches where options are limited.

Some examples

Person and background

Why

Because we didn’t want to create another route that simply connects the greatest hits of the Alps: we wanted the in-between to be as meaningful as the epic climbs.

A mountain pass is only one part of a journey. What comes before it sets the rhythm; what comes after lets you absorb the effort. A dirt road through a forest, a small village, a bar in an old train station, an improvised shelter from a summer storm — none of these are simply filler or transition. They are part of the route.

This is also why Alternative Altitude Alps doesn’t try to keep you away from civilisation. Quite the opposite, we wanted riders to experience the valleys as well as the mountains, and to meet the people who live there. You might start the day in the faded Italian railway station in Susa, eat lunch at a table with local families in Rochemolles, share a breakfast with hikers in the Val Clarée, cross paths with shepherds on the other side of Galibier, and finish the day looking across the mountains from an old military road.

And then there is the view, that gave us a real sense of vertigo.

The route loops around Mount Chaberton, and from many of its high points you can see both where you’ve already been and where you’re going next. A climb you crossed yesterday can suddenly appear on the horizon; another one is waiting beyond it.

After a few days, the landscape becomes almost a map of itself.

You look back and see the distance you’ve covered. Then you look ahead, and realise there’s still a lot left. That really impressed us, making us feeling both satisfied and scared, powerful and powerless, as only the mountains and the sea can do.

That’s Alternative Altitude Alps.

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Industry: a quick detour

Where to find interesting stories? Quick answer: where things and people are on the move.

Alternative Altitude Alps

A 400km, 14.000mt offroad bikepacking route. Why did we think that was a good thing?

Turning constraints into narrative keys: Paul Fusco’s Kennedy’s Funeral Train [1968]

The italian saying is "fare di necessità virtù": a classic reportage and what it can teach us about cycling photography

How does Memory work? 4 ideas for cycling storytelling inspired by Wim Wenders’ “Once” [1993]

A book of simple pictures (and four simple ideas) showing us how memory works.

Little vademecum for shooting while cycling. #1 – Editing.

Efrezet — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 13:47:01 +0000

Small handbook about photography while cycletouring. #1 - Editing

The poll spoke: most of you readers are curious about the editing, so here we go with photo editing.

Which, sorry to disappoint, starts before actually retouching the picture in Lightroom, Snapseed, or VSCR. First of all, we must choose the picture we want to edit. And most of the times, this is a painful task, since we find ourselves facing lots of them. So, this first piece is dedicated to the choice of the pictures, and to how make it less burdensome.

Our first task: from "too many pics" to a reasonable amount

How many times did we come back from a trip, opened the folder, and then cried at the sight of 4058 pictures to scroll? This is honestly very discouraging.

Therefore, before talking postproduction – apps and software, color grading, shadows and highlights, texture and clarity, masks and vignette, and so on – we must talk about how to eliminate pictures. Very important step to survive.

Easy: if we have 100 or 1000 pics, it makes a huge difference in our mood when we have to edit the pictures. Many of us already know this too well: having too many pictures is the first obstacle to having fun while shooting.

As for weight, the same about pictures. The less, the better, the funnier.

There are ways to end up with a reasonable amoun of pictures at the end of our adventure, no matter if it’s a long day ride or a month-long crossing of a Continent.

Shoot less, shoot better. But how (and - are we so sure)?

The first solution is “shoot less”, of course. Simple thing, but not easy at all. Our cameras make us very comfy with the shutter button; but that’s only part of the challenge.

Most of the times I keep only 10-15% of the pics I shoot. Sometimes it’s a bit more, but I rarely reach 20%.

Personally, this is one of my medium-term goals: during the two chapters of VIA race I had the opportunity of seeing experienced professionals at work, and they shot half the pictures compared to me (at least). There was a lot of walking, a lot of thinking, and then one or two clicks. A matter of experience, no doubt. I am working towards that, but it takes a while.

Moreover, I don’t think shooting less is possible when starting to enjoy photography. It’s also good to take a lot of them, to understand what works and what not. Provided that we study our work afterward, trying to understand why that works or not.

Not a digital-only issue. Contact sheet

So, let’s go directly to the main point: removing the unnecessary pics.

Yes, unnecessary, not “ugly”. The goal, usually, is to understand what story we want to tell. If we manage to do that, choosing the pics will be so much easier, because we will understand very easily those whoch help the story to advance, and those which don’t add anything. And sometimes we need a not-nice picture to fill a gap in the narrative.

Anyway, let’s stick to single pictures. How do you choose the right one among a series, designating one survivor among similar images?

Sometimes it’s very simple, and you see that one image shines over the similar ones. But most of the time, it doesn’t happen.

This “having too many pics” is not because of the digital: even during film era, you can see that only a small percentage of pictures made it until the print phase.

The topic is so important that it made the subject of one of the most famous books by Magnum, called “contact sheet”. And so important that you can find several of these stories online too, on Magnum’s portal, under the super-appropriate label “making the image“. The book analyzes many famous photographs, showing the process of choosing the good images within the roll. This allows to understand the reasoning of the photographers as well as their intention – how long did they wait for the perfect shot? How many compositions, how many angles did they try before being satisfied?

The first thing you’ll notice while browsing the book is that you enter the photographer’s mind: you really see how they see, feel how they think. The second thing is that a picture is not taken but made: the photographer always chooses one among many, so he takes action on reality – because of this choice, photography is something active, not simply a registration of a fact. It’s what we decide to tell and not to tell.

But we are going too far with the philosophy. Let’s stick to the main issue, editing, a polite way to say remove all what’s unnecessary.

Probably the easiest way to get used to the selection is seeing some practical situation. Let’s go with real situations, with a tech note: almost all pics you’ll see here are unedited RAWs, that’s why they look a bit flat in color and contrast.

Some examples

Person and background

Nelson is OK, but there is a second person coming from the left: it doesn't add anything, so it's just a distraction

Nelson is OK, but the gesture is not clear

OK: the gesture is clear, the expression is nicer, and the background is free from distractions

Let’s start with a simple case like a single person. During Nelson Trees’ talk at BAM! I shot a few dozens pics. He was speaking to a small crowd while riding a turbo trainer, during the Senza Freni interview. From this point of view they were 6-8: the backlit situation made it a little bit trickier and I chose to wait a bit and catch a good moment.

Between these three pics, only one is good, and deserves a proper post-production: it’s the third one, because it’s the right combination between the subject expression, the gesture, and the background.

In cases like these, where you have a subject that is stuck in a fixed place, you can experiment a lot: a very practical situation.

Situation

This second case is more interesting. I wanted to capture a daily life scene, with kids fishing under the rail bridge at the outskirts of a town in southern France. I shot a series of 10 pics in about two minutes. Here you see four of them, all still without postproduction.

First I found a composition that I liked, with the bridge on the upper part, a small bit of the houses beneath it, and the river and family down.

The first thing was waiting for the road being without cars, to show the “southern France” houses in their peach color.

Then there was the subject: single kid under the bridge with the fishing rod in his hand, and the rest of the family on the left part.

The composition was set, but it wasn’t really soomething, so I waited (01).

I shot once more (02) when the kid was throwing the rod in the water: at least the scene was alive.

Things got better when the brother arrived (03): the subject was then a bit more visible, being “heavier” within the frame. But I didn’t like the grey car passing in the background.

So I waited a bit more, and had a clean shot with the brothers fishing together (04).

I am not completely satisfied with the final results, since this last one lacks action; in the (02) the action was clearer, but the kid is alone. While writing this, I don’t know yet which one I will choose, but at least I’ve reduced the options from 10 images to two.

Action, overlap, and alignment

In many cases, the key is alignment (or rather the lack of superposition). This is a very common situation.

Here I was covering the Gran Fondo Fausto Coppi. I found this old building next to a cave, and it was a nice background to show the flow of riders. I took several pics in quick sequence, trying to catch a good positioning of people in the frame. Remember that this is an unedited RAW, there is no correction even on the horizontal and geometry.

The first is not bad, with the two riders evenly placed.

The second is also correct, with the single rider on the right balancing the restaurant old label on the left. But I wanted to show a group of people rather than a solitary adventure, so I kept shooting.

The third is also OK, but it’s the fourth that works better: three cyclists, and the two on the sides are cut, which suggests the idea that the they are like chain links: more will follow and more are already past that point.

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Take these recent shots, from Pain au Chocolat. I was waiting on the top of Pas de Pelle for the riders to go through that tarmac patch in the middle of the wide forest; there was a group of five, but I had no clues to anticipate the timing, so I waited with my eye into the camera for a few minutes; being downhill, the timing window was short. Being a few KM downs, I couldn’t know if the five riders were still together at that point.

As soon as I saw the first rider I shot a quick series (not a burst, though); as you can see, the first pics shows the first and only rider in the midst of the patch. The second one is much better, showing him plus three more; the third is already too late, and the riders are not perfectly visible. Easy choice.

BTW, as I showed elsewhere, this”alignment” issue is the main challenge of my usual game of putting things in frames

Check the "put things into frames" thing

Practical tip #1: put distance (of some sort)

The first tip is about attitude – be ruthless, be detached, be as lucid as possible. There are far more reasons to discard a picture than to keep it. It’s not an easy task, because all pics are our sons and daughters. But it’s key. You can achieve the detachment by letting the pictures aside for a bit, but this is not our case – the goal of this article is to learn to get faster, not to waste time.

You can ask someone else to do the task, if they still talk to you 🙂 When I’m in doubt, I ask my wife Anna, and she’s very effective in cutting all the useless branches: having an external eye (an educated one, possibly) helps a lot in this task, because it ensures some healthy distance from the pictures.

Or you can try by yourself – asking who would like this picture, and why? Or, which pictures would you like to see hanging at the wall in your room?

My French teacher used to say that if you can’t answer clearly, you probably didn’t study enough. This is true here too: if you can’t justify with words the reason to keep a picture, it’s probably not worth it.

Anything that allows you to put some distance from your Jpegs and RAWs works, just find what suits you best.

Practical tip #2: one KM at the time

Second, don’t wait till the end of the trip. As with kid’s summer schoolbooks, it’s way easier if you do the work little by little. It becomes painless, and it saves you a lot of time afterwards; but most of all it eliminates that anguish when we are in front of a wall of pictures to look at.

Concretely, there are several ways to make the burden lighter.

You can do it every evening, while you wait for the stove to cook the food, or before going to bed in your tent.

Or you can do it at a few breaks during the day, while waiting for Turkish coffee or sipping a fresh coke. Two times per day, say noon and evening. Or even more often.

Or you can do it at the end of every “photo opportunity”, the very minimal photographic unit.

As soon as you finished shooting something, before even starting to ride again, you can evaluate your pics: you’ll probably have 10 or 30 photos to peruse, meaning just a minute. This way, you don’t have the distance that allows objectivity, but on the other hand you have fresh in mind why and what you wanted to shoot. And at evening, when your eyes will close after a long day in the saddle, you will not have 200 or 500 pics to check.

Stories from Züri Escape: surveying fails, cemeteries on AirBnB, and Kierkegaard

Practical tip #3: use your camera to make it smoother

Every camera has some feature to evaluate pictures: the lock function is about preventing an accidental delete, but you can also use the lock function as a way to mark interesting pictures.

Most cameras have also a star system to evaluate your work: it’s a precious feature, because lightroom (and most softwares) recognize these marks. So, when you’ll import the pictures, you will find the stars already there.

In my case, OM cameras (as well as older Olympus) have something called Share order, which is extremely useful: see on the right.

I reckon all brands have a similar feature: if you get used to that, it can make a great difference in how you process the photos – meaning you can do it very fast and stress-free.

OM system Share order

on your camera
- open the photo playback
- click OK then “share order”
- arrow UP or DOWN both add a sharing symbol (upper right corner). Pushing again up/down remove the mark.
on the OM app:
- as soon as you choose “import photos”, the app recognizes the marked pictures and automatically download these (and only these).
- when you quit the import menu, the share order automatically resets on your camera, so that the next time you import pictures, you don’t have doubles.

Practical tip #4: think in sequences, not single shots

This requires a bit of extra training and/or experience, but no worries, it will come.

Try not to judge a picture in isolation. A photo that looks unremarkable on its own can become essential once you see what comes before or after it — and a technically “perfect” shot can turn out to be dead weight if it doesn’t connect to anything else in the set.

This is where selection stops being about “nice vs. ugly” and becomes about “useful vs. not” , or good/bad – a different, harder question, but a much more interesting one.

Ask yourself: does this picture move the story forward, or does it just repeat what another one already says better? If two shots tell the same beat, keep the stronger one and let the other go, however nice it looks by itself.

This is also where the anguish creeps back in — too many options, no way to compare them all at once in your head. The trick is the same one that gets you unstuck out on the road: stop treating every picture as its own decision, and start treating the selection as one single decision about the whole set. It’s easier to choose a story than to choose a thousand photos one at a time.

See you soon: some editing apps

Hopefully, next time you’ll shoot you’ll be less worried about this tedious part of the workflow. Let me know about it, and see you soon with the next episode, where we’ll talk about post-production with a very small selection of apps (plus one non-app), free and less free.

Industry: a quick detour

Where to find interesting stories? Quick answer: where things and people are on the move.

Alternative Altitude Alps

A 400km, 14.000mt offroad bikepacking route. Why did we think that was a good thing?

Turning constraints into narrative keys: Paul Fusco’s Kennedy’s Funeral Train [1968]

The italian saying is "fare di necessità virtù": a classic reportage and what it can teach us about cycling photography

How does Memory work? 4 ideas for cycling storytelling inspired by Wim Wenders’ “Once” [1993]

A book of simple pictures (and four simple ideas) showing us how memory works.

Turning constraints into narrative keys: Paul Fusco’s Kennedy’s Funeral Train [1968]

Efrezet — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 15:43:21 +0000

Turning constraints into narrative keys: Paul Fusco's Kennedy’s Funeral Train [1968].

What is RFK Funeral Train, and why we talk about a funeral?

Wait, wasn’t it meant to be a cycling photography blog? And now we read about funerals?

Yes, and this is precisely why Paul Fusco’s classic work is invaluable.

How many times did you think “I’d want to shoot some pics at that castle over there, but I’ll be too late for the camping?”

When we travel, we have sort-of rails to follow, even if we roam freely and have a lot of time.

Enters Paul Fusco (1930–2020), a Magnum photographer (and also Matt Black’s mentor – we’ll probably talk about Black, because he’s another “wow” resource for our cycling-photography goals. RFK Funeral train is a political and social reportage, one that before becoming a classical work was neglected for decades in Magnum’s archives. It came about by chance.

It’s also a reportage shot entirely from a train seat, which is another fascinating aspect because, as probably noone ever said,

“Trains are a cyclist's best friends.”

As Fusco himself recounts, “That day I wasn’t supposed to work, but I lived in Manhattan and decided to drop by the office. […] There was a heavy atmosphere of anguish. Bill Arthur, the editor, saw me and called me into his office. ‘Paul, go to Penn Station; they’re taking Kennedy’s coffin to Washington. Get on that train.’ He didn’t add another word, didn’t say what he wanted, what kind of photos, whether he had any ideas—nothing. I didn’t ask anything either; that’s how it worked back then. […] I quickly found the train, which was surrounded by Secret Service agents. I showed my press card and got on. An agent pointed to a seat in the eighth car and told me, ‘Sit here and don’t move.’”

Fusco had three cameras — two Leicas and a Nikon — and a few dozen rolls of film. However, he was forbidden to photograph the casket, which was kept in the ninth car.

“I didn’t know what to do. I figured that in Washington and later at Arlington Cemetery, we’d find dozens of colleagues and cameras waiting. I needed an idea, fast. I was filled with anxiety, but all it took was looking out the window to understand: I saw the crowds, and it all became clear. I lowered the window and started shooting. I stayed in the same position for eight hours, photographing the people by the tracks. That was the story.”

And what a story. He was seated on the right side of the train, heading south: at first, the light flooded the entire scene, and later, as the sun set, it illuminated the people from behind. Fusco took thousands of photos, and his reportage ended at the final stop—Arlington.

Let’s get back to cycling and the themes that interest us—there are so many here. The reasons why Fusco is such a valuable author are stylistic, artistic, logistical, and conceptual. Essentially, he brings it all to the table.

In fact, Fusco turned coal into diamonds, exploiting the very limited situation to his own advantage to create a specific narrative. But this is only the first element of his magic.

People, faces, emotions

In interviews about that pivotal day, Fusco recalls:

“I was overwhelmed by the constant flow of people, by their variety and their grief; the loss they had suffered was visible. Most of the time, we hide—we don’t want people to know what we’re feeling. But that day, almost no one was hiding; it was a wave of uninterrupted emotion.”

Critic Louis Menand, in his piece for The New Yorker, insists on this, noticing that he focused on people’s faces, put against a blurred background; this way, he focused on emotions: “Fusco’s photographs are extraordinary in every way. […] There’s a nakedness that is rare in public. These people don’t think anyone is looking at them; —a nakedness that many photographers have tried to capture. It’s here.”

For different and happier reasons, something similar happens during cycling adventures (let alone ultracycling races, where all barriers come down very quickly).

Fatigue breaks down our barriers, and the threshold of our embarrassment rises dramatically: on a trip with friends, on the first day, we walk 30 meters away to change clothes; by the second day, the first tree will be far enough, and by the third—who cares, I’m just changing here besides the campfire.

This nakedness isn’t just physical, obviously. We stop hiding our emotions, whether it’s a huge grin when spotting a roadside trattoria or utter dismay when discovering it’s been abandoned since 2009. Our gestures betray our state of mind, our posture reveals fatigue, and the vacant stare while resting at a table confirms it all. All this is a great raw material for pictures, because, like Fusco, we’re not dealing with an ordinary situation, but an extraordinary one. In this sense, bicycles are catalysts or accelerators of both emotions and stories: they bring emotions to the surface and make them vividly visible.

Seeking the story on the margins

Imagine being in Fusco’s shoes and receiving the same assignment. The immediate thought would be to capture the motorcade, the solemn ceremony, the minimalist symmetry of Arlington Cemetery, and the solemn, impassive faces. That’s the obvious subject of the reportage: the funeral.

But on second thought, that’s not much—or rather, it’s a bit empty. Beyond providing a photo for a newspaper’s front page, such an image doesn’t convey much: it gives the news – the fact – and nothing more.

This black-and-white photo of the funeral (perhaps also by Fusco) depicts the fact of the funeral, and little more. It is news, whereas the images from the train are a story.

Driven by necessity, Fusco chooses to look where others aren’t: the edges of the story. And here he uncovers a much more compelling narrative. In theory, the train journey is a secondary, logistical detail; but in reality, by photographing the crowds along the tracks, he captures something far deeper—an emotional, human response that transforms the story’s narrative. These photos remain relevant even today, speaking to those of us who never knew RFK or are not even American. They allow us to understand his popularity, the historical period he lived through, and the places he called home. These images tell the story of his life more effectively than the story of his death.

Similarly, in cycling adventures, focusing on the unexpected, the peripheral, or the moments between moments often leads to the most meaningful and memorable images.

When we think “cycling photography” we immediately think of action, speed, athletism, physical achievement. But the reality is that interesting things emerge from the non-cycling moments.

Right now – July 2026 – I am dotwatching TCR while on holiday, and this picture by Saskia Dugon reminds me why I love shooting ultra: the bike is not even there, yet the story is powerful. Why has this guy stopped? Where is his bike? is he waiting for a mechanic to repair some stuff? Is he waiting for food? Is He thinking of scratching? Where are we? There are visual hints of a balkan-ish language, but nothing sure. Then. of course, the people: did they saw him? Are they going to talk each other, what are they thinking of this smelly cyclist? Is that a bus stop, perhaps?

I’m always on the look for this kind of photographs when I cover ultraraces (incidentally, this is why Checkpoints are also irresistible).

From constraints to consistency

In the Funeral Train photos, there’s a strong formal consistency. Unsurprisingly, given that Fusco’s perspective was as limited as it gets. Sure, he could change lenses, cameras, and settings (of his three cameras, it seems that one was in black and white and two in Kodachrome, though we don’t know the focal lengths). But ultimately, he was on a moving train, and that perspective didn’t change. Quite a big constraint.

Most of the photos are horizontal, adding to their coherence. All are shot from a high vantage point, as the train passed over embankments or elevated tracks through urban centers. This accidental framing also has symbolic value, contributing to the narrative by suggesting reverence and importance from Fusco’s elevated perspective—a fortunate coincidence that reinforces the story.

So, from this constraints Fusco obtained a strong visual homogeneity which further reinforces the narrative.

If the photos were a mix of black-and-white and color, or if the focal lengths varied widely, or the point of view was low then high – our eyes would lose focus. Instead, we are forced to sit still as the train slowly moves from New York to Arlington.

In this linear flow, a few exceptions stand out and give the occasional “different” photograph: for example the tighter shot of an African American woman or the funeral itself.

This coherence and attention to the margins of the story are valuable lessons. They remind us to embrace constraints and look for hidden narratives, whether on a bike trip or in any other storytelling endeavor. By doing so, we can create stories that resonate far beyond the immediate moment.

Fortunate constraints

That’s not all. One of the most compelling aspects of Fusco’s Funeral Train project is that, by chance, its forced consistency is reinforced by the natural course of the day. The train journey begins in broad daylight, with bright overhead sunlight. As the train moves on, the shadows grow longer, and the golden hues of sunset backlight the people gathered to honor RFK. Eventually, the light fades into darkness, forcing Fusco to use slower shutter speeds, which resulted in blurred, dimly lit photos. As he recalls,

“As the light faded, the photographs became blurry, grainy. I started to worry as I watched the sun go down. The faces became less and less recognizable: it was the dissolution of a story, of a life, of the American dream.”

This transition from light to darkness provided an organic aesthetic to tell the story of a funeral, mirroring the journey from hope to loss, from love to tragedy and grief.

Other Projects based on constraints

Fusco’s use of constraints has inspired many other photographers. For example, Jacopo Di Cera’s MI-RO project uses a similar theme of a train journey, with an added element of formal consistency: each photo is framed to mimic the square windows of a train. This device enhances the coherence of the project, turning a simple aesthetic choice into a storytelling tool.

After discussing Roy DeCarava and his unique narrative style, we continue gathering reflections on other authors and projects that inspire storytelling about bicycles and travel.

Three lessons from Funeral Train and cycling photography

It should be clear, by now, why Fusco’s work matters so much to us. For cyclists and storytellers alike, Fusco’s cornerstone work is a reminder that limits can become strengths, provided we approach them creatively.

1. Turning necessity into opportunity

The idea that “every crisis holds an opportunity” or “when life gives you lemon, make lemonade” applies here. Constraints, like being stuck on a bike route or unable to deviate from a path, can spark creativity.

For example, while cycling, you could limit yourself to taking only frontal photos of the road ahead. Such a constraint might result in unexpected and compelling moments: animals crossing, abandoned objects, or serendipitous encounters. Planning ahead can make this even more effective, as the narrative gains coherence when guided by the limits we define on purpose.

Even if you’re traveling with a disposable camera, unable to adjust settings, you can embrace that constraint and use it as part of your visual narrative. That is the case for example with the smartphone, which usually has poor handling: better use it in auto, and look for different creative solutions.

2. Fortune favors the bold

Luck plays a bigger role in storytelling than we often admit. Fusco’s constraints—such as the slow-moving train, the diverse and often rural crowd, and the changing light—happened to align perfectly with his narrative. The setting sun added a natural crescendo to his visual story, culminating in blurred, poignant images that captured the emotion of the moment.

Sometimes, we are lucky too. For example, it occurred to me during a reportage of Vittoria Bussi’s training at the Aigle velodrome, in Switzerland. The track featured a striking brown-and-blue color scheme, with the golden hues of the wood contrasted by the blue furnishings. Coincidentally, the hotel also had a light blue palette, although with reddish furniture and details: this provided a seamless visual continuity. This unplanned harmony of colors became a subtle yet powerful narrative device.

3. Trains: A cyclist’s natural ally

Trains play a special role with cyclists —they’re not only practical companions and tools, but also fascinating settings for storytelling. Trains provide a unique backdrop and a unique blend of structure and unpredictability. They follow a predetermined path, yet the journey is filled with surprises: shifting light conditions, fleeting glimpses of remote places, and unguarded moments among passengers. For cyclists, trains also represent a transition—a bridge between the freedom of the road and the comfort of home, or a way to access distant adventures. They are the famous “in-between moments” where interesting things happen. They aren’t just a means of transportation but a canvas for stories, a real treasure trove of potential inspiration.

For me (as for many, I am sure) photographing trains has become a ritual, marking the start or end of a photographic journey.

Journey on a freight train: reportage

To explore further

Last Journey
History – Inside RFK’s Funeral Train
The atlantic
New Yorker
Maestri di fotografia – Paul Fusco (La repubblica / National Geographic)

Industry: a quick detour

2 Ottobre 2026Logs/reports, Personal Project, Stories and tellers

Where to find interesting stories? Quick answer: where things and people are on the move.

Alternative Altitude Alps

21 Settembre 2026Personal Project, Stories and tellers

A 400km, 14.000mt offroad bikepacking route. Why did we think that was a good thing?

Turning constraints into narrative keys: Paul Fusco’s Kennedy’s Funeral Train [1968]

28 Luglio 2026Stories and tellers, tools/techniques

The italian saying is "fare di necessità virtù": a classic reportage and what it can teach us about cycling photography

How does Memory work? 4 ideas for cycling storytelling inspired by Wim Wenders’ “Once” [1993]

Efrezet — Tue, 28 Jul 2026 09:28:47 +0000

How does Memory work? 4 ideas for cycling storytelling inspired by Wim Wenders' "Once" [1993]

And once
I drove from Los Angeles
all the way up to Barstow
in the middle of Mojave Desert,
together with Dennis Hopper,
to see Nick.

Wim Wenders, Once, p.46

Barstow and the memory of images

Barstow, California, lies in a basin halfway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, surrounded by dust and dry shrubs. It’s one of those inland American towns you forget the moment you’ve passed through it. Like those along Route 66, but without the legend that goes with the road.

Therefore, finding it again in a book, not simply mentioned but made the very subject of such a vivid memory, even with a photo — felt strange. That Barstow could be as a destination itself – that, I didn’t know.

For me, Barstow meant two things: a large train hub; and one-night stop during the Peak2Peak supported cycling fundraiser event, organised by USARC.

I joined as a volunteer and photographer. From Big Bear to Mammoth by bike — five days of riding to raise funds in support of young people with disabilities in sports.

So, when I reached this page in Wenders’ Once, I was flooded with memories; my mind began to travel.

My task was to follow the group – around 100 enthusiast riders with all kinds of bikes – in a pickup that guzzled fuel like a train. The classic American pickup. Along with the other vehicles in the caravan, we served as sweep, scout, refreshment, and company.

And of course, I took photos: those few months in the U.S. were the third piece of the puzzle that made me start thinking of photography as something serious. (For the record, the first was a rambling trip along the Alta Via dei Monti Liguri with three friends; the second, a honeymoon by bike through the Balkans; the fourth and last, the Lazio Trail.)

But how does memory work, really? Of that unforgettable trip, I remember the people: David — one of the founders of P2P, my guide in San Gabriel, and a dear friend; Jeff from Colorado, the owner of that enormous pickup; Matt, the official photographer. I also remember the feelings tied to the Owens Valley, and the moment I began to grasp the Western mindset toward adventure and nature. And so many other moments, some sharp, others blurred. How does memory work?

In Barstow we slept in an unremarkable sports center, packed together in our sleeping bags. The next morning, I was supposed to stand at an intersection to direct participants toward Ridgecrest. The town — I remember David’s description well; he knew every secret of the valley, having first worked on the trains and later for the Bureau of Land Management — is a major railroad hub for freight arriving at the vast Port of Los Angeles. Otherwise, it’s a pretty nondescript place.

Other places from that experience left far more vivid memories: the Manzanar internment camp; the town of Lone Pine with its enormous gun store; the post-apocalyptic village of Red Mountain, where silver prospectors pile up heaps of arsenic along the roadside, totally cool; the night I slept in a bivvy below freezing — that one I remember clearly. I also remember Ridgecrest, known only for the earthquake that had destroyed it four months earlier. That’s where, at base camp, I took this silhouette at dawn.

And yet, my memory connected the dots on its own; it brought back all those stories starting from Wenders’ two photos, linking them to mine. It pieced together the story of those five days in a Californian valley.

Videos VS photos and our memory

Personal memories aside, Wenders’ photos of Barstow raise that mysterious question about memory. The nostalgia they stirred feels gentle, almost cheerful. I let myself sink into it with pleasure, even as I become painfully aware of the time that has passed. Even his short texts are nostalgic, and by that I mean that they are not simply descriptions of the pictures. Yes, they tell what’s the situation, and they add some bits of information: the place he drives by, the friends he meets, the purpose of the trip.

But – and it’s a very important but – all of us can relate to them in some ways, because they describe universal situations.

Not unlike Roy De Carava’s unique combination of words and images, they play very effectively with the relationship between real and plausible. How’s that?

And, by contrast, how is that possible that the same nostalgia is not awakened by old videos?

Watching the videos from those same moments on my time in California feels cruel: instead of bringing pleasant sensations back to the surface, they highlight the gap between then and now.

We instinctively associate photography with memory and remembrance. We look through old photo albums and rediscover childhood, grandparents and uncles long gone, houses since demolished or renovated beyond recognition. Yet the feeling is almost always gentle, even sweet.

Instead, when we watch home movies or videos of those very same moments, anguish sets in. Why is the difference so stark?

Different nostalgias

Recently, I read an article by Roberto Morelli that explores precisely this difference, and I found myself completely reflected in it:

“It doesn’t happen only to me. I fall in love again with photo albums and nestle into the nostalgia of printed pictures. [...] But if the exact film of those moments appears — if I’m made to relive the gestures, voices, and sounds in their precise unfolding — I can’t bear the impact. What’s moving in a snapshot becomes painful and alienating in a stream of images. I don’t want to see them anymore. So why is that?” His conclusion is clear: “My unease,” writes Morelli, “comes from the merging of everything into a complete fragment of life, which I watch even as I’m living in my present time. The video brings back from the past a whole slice of life that we can no longer fit into the present.”

Roberto Morelli Tweet

That discomfort leads to outright refusal:

“I’ve carefully put everything away in a drawer: I won’t open it again. […] Different image formats, worn by time — fragments of my life and my family’s, my wife Sandra and our three children when they were small. […] I’ll never watch them again. The old videos hurt too much.”

Open photos, closed videos

According to Morelli, the reason for this gap between photos and videos lies in their finiteness. The film, he writes,

“Leaves no room for imagination; it’s conclusive and definitive. It even has a kind of mortality, because the people in that moment — the versions of us that once were — no longer exist.”

In short, a video contains everything: form, color, movement, sound — it’s a finished narrative. There’s no room for nostalgia, which must instead compose itself freely (and imprecisely — the video evidence often contradicts our flawed memories). It contains so much that it reminds us of our mortality, which, well, is not a happy thing.

A photograph, by contrast, is only form and color; it invites us to complete the picture, to reconstruct it with our own tools, freely. This is why Wim Wenders pictures (but I’d say any good picture) work for anybody. Universal situations that could be also present and future, rather than exact, unique pieces of life that are no more.

That’s probably why photographs are said to be even more evocative in black and white, and they are called “timeless”: with color removed, there’s even more space for us to fill in the gaps.

For the same reason, we undergo a video, powerless, while a photograph activates us — our mind becomes its protagonist. It’s free to build a new architecture from that fragment.

Even if we don’t fully understand how memory works, we know it responds differently to these two forms of image.

“Photography,” Morelli writes, “seems to me the exact opposite. Its stillness opens space for imagination, caresses memory, invites us to rummage through it. It doesn’t have the video’s pretension to tell everything. It opens something up; it forces us to elaborate, whereas video, in its completeness, shuts down every possibility.”

And so the conclusion is simple:

A film closes; a photo opens.

We could put it another way: while the film tells, the photo suggests. It’s the same idea explored by Geoff Dyer in his essay The Ongoing Moment: but rather than infinite, from this perspective photography is indefinite — it has no borders, it’s unfinished. Completing it is up to us.

Four Ideas by Wim Wenders for when we ride and shoot

All this philosophical stuff leads us to four very fertile insights for all of us who try to tell a story starting from a bike trip. Of course, the matter is subjective: each person notices or is stimulated by different elements depending on their own experience, culture, and interests. The ideas could be many more!

First: suggest to tell

Inevitably, this work of freely reconstructing memories from a few images is highly subjective. To connect the missing dots and rebuild the story from those fragments, we have to use our imagination. This leads us to a simple conclusion—one that gains new value in light of this awareness: the meaning of a photograph largely depends on the viewer. Its sense is completed individually, depending on one’s experiences, inclinations, and cultural or personal sensitivities.

The good news is that this incompleteness leaves us a wide range of interpretations: each one of us will see different things, and his/her memory will be sparked in different directions.

This range of creative possibilities is, in fact, much narrower when we watch a video than when we look at a handful of photos. Among memories of journeys through desolate parts of America and recollections of his friends and colleagues, Wim Wenders writes:

Just as I, while photographing, wanted to lose myself out there—in the world and within things—in the same way now the world and things emerge from the photograph to enter into me, or into any other observer, and there they wish to keep acting. Only there do stories come to life—there, in the eye of the beholder.

—W. Wenders, Once

He touches on a very interesting theme: that of stories and how to structure them—a true storytelling strategy encapsulated in aphorisms: “Only through photography does time become visible, and in the time between the first photograph and the second, the story appears.”

Here it is: storytelling is built not so much within the photos themselves, but in the gaps between one photo and the next. The more photographs suggest rather than show, the more powerful they become, leaving room for the viewer to fill in the blanks. As a result, in photographic storytelling, details often matter most: they hint without fully revealing, they are a bit less literal. It’s up to us to imagine what happened in between. The story will be born from the sequence of photos, which therefore don’t need to be self-sufficient one by one.

Second: photography must be nourished from the outside

Wim Wenders was inspired and curious because he saw photography through a narrative lens within a film. His title choice, Once, refers to the first sentence of classical fairy tales. And he explicitly said, about his photos, that each one could be the first scene of a movie.

Each of us can use this same mechanism—drawing on outside interests as levers to fuel our photography. Sporting passions, culinary interests, professional activities: everything can contribute to making our photography richer. Photography for photography’s sake, like art for art’s sake, is probably neither as exciting nor as fulfilling.

If background is so important, the same goes for the goal, because purpose works more or less the same way: if we shoot with a theme in mind – can be gas stations, for example – we are more active at looking, we know what we want, and our photos will be more interesting because of that.

Third: any camera will do

(Well, almost.) Wim Wenders took most of his photos with a Polaroid, and that’s part of the book’s charm. It’s true that he used them partly to understand light for the films he was shooting, but not always—and not only. He also photographed for pleasure.

Sure, some tools are better than others relatively to our purpose (I discussed elsewhere why I like M43 format for cycling photography). Plus, the limitations of your camera can become a narrative key, as we saw about Paul Fusco’s Funeral Train (this applies to smartphones too!). Yet it’s clear that, while shooting, Wenders was fully satisfied with his tool. He wouldn’t have hesitated to change it if it weren’t adequate.

In short, as the saying goes: the best camera is the one you have. Period.

Fourth: no place, no moment is “Non-photogenic”

There are no truly uninteresting places for taking pictures—or at least, they’re much rarer than we think. Personally, I have my own perversion: gas stations, old walls, lately even air conditioned inverters make me grab my camera. Provided there’s somebody doing something.

He himself says it clearly, so clearly that it’s worth quoting the whole short poem. We could print it poster size and put it on the wall, alongside Martin Parr’s 10 advices and Oakley Hall’s 15 rules to write effectively:

Every second,
somewhere in the world,
someone releases a shutter
capturing something
because he (or she) is fascinated by a certain LIGHT
or FACE,
or GESTURE
or LANDSCAPE
or MOOD,
or simply because a SITUATION
wants to be captured.
The subjects of photography,
obviously,
are countless.
Every second multiplies them infinitely again.

—W. Wenders, Once, p.50

Practically anything can be an interesting subject to photograph—also because beauty can become tiresome. What’s truly worth telling almost always passes through a challenge, a sad or unpleasant moment; thus, decay and desolation are essential parts of any story.

On this last idea, I completely agree: when I think of some truly “non-photogenic” places, a few do come to mind, yes. But I’m quite sure that by exploring them more deeply, I’d uncover something interesting. Usually, if we think a place is unfit for photography, the shortcoming is on our side.

To explore further

- Wim Wenders, Una volta, contrasto 2015.

- Geoff Dyer, l’infinito istante, Il Saggiatore 2022.

- Tatiana Hopper, Wim Wenders’ polaroids, youtube.

- Roberto Morelli, ma quanto sono strazianti i vecchi filmini? Il Post, 9/7/2025

Stories from Züri Escape: surveying fails, cemeteries on AirBnB, and Kierkegaard

Efrezet — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 07:18:33 +0000

Stories from Züri Escape: surveying fails, cemeteries on AirBnB, and Kierkegaard

When things aren’t easy to begin with, but the team makes them easy through sheer competence and willingness to help, the work goes great — even starting off already a bit worn out after a long stretch of intense jobs. That’s exactly how it was with Züri Escape.

Dominik and Fabian created The Cake Movement to bring together gravel events that range from competitive to laid-back, but are all thoroughly convivial.

Back in October 2024 I’d covered Dead Ends & Dolci, run by Dominik and Stefano, and it had been a wonderful discovery (I wrote about it for Alvento 36 and for Bikeitalia). That was the first event of a wonderful collaboration that will continue very soon with Pain au Chocolat – the only pain we like, a 1.000km road race with optional party pace. While writing this, I am in the middle of the route survey.

Züri Escape and me

Züri Escape is a 400km gravel loop around Lake Zurich; 52 hours of racing limit, a dozen volunteers across two checkpoints, and — most notably — 100 participants: 50 women and 50 men, a rare split.

By now, covering these events — self-supported, everyone riding at their own ambition, pace, and habits — is becoming, if not quite routine, at least vaguely familiar; I have some reference points and a few consolidated procedures. VIA Race in particular (thanks to Ryan Le Garrec, among others) was an incredible training ground and gave me a few extra tools for handling situations like this.

But out in the field, procedures and reference points are only worth so much — the here and now takes over. You can prepare and plan all you like, but once the clock starts, you have to build short- and medium-term strategies to cover the race as well as possible, then rework those strategies more or less constantly. On top of that, even though the race is long, everything can hinge on a matter of seconds: it often comes down to catching a rider, or missing them, because of one red light too many.

Surprises are always around the corner — some funny, some with a happy ending, some without. Here’s a rundown of what happened to me over these three days and two nights of work.

Cemeteries on AirBnB

The first is a story about failure. The holy grail of ultracycling photography is riders asleep — a highly sought-after prey: they sleep little, and when they don’t stop at proper accommodation (where they’re obviously out of reach), they tuck themselves away somewhere quiet, far from traffic and passersby; to top it off, the trackers often have a sleep/incognito feature to hide the exact location. So you can imagine a photo like James Robertson’s It’s a Race is worth a thousand points. Who knows if it took a long stakeout, a tip-off, or pure luck.

Closing in quietly

The night between Saturday and Sunday I sleep at CP2, the mountain hut run masterfully by Larissa, Luca, and Christof. As Jennifer put it perfectly: it’s hard to reach the checkpoint, but even harder to leave it.

I decide to rest there a few hours and wake up before dawn, hoping to find some riders sleeping somewhere interesting. At 4:40am I jump in the car and start heading down. There’s no signal at the hut, so I have no idea how the race has evolved overnight — my decision to sleep wasn’t based on fresh information, just on the plain fact that I needed some rest after 18 hours of work.

The moment I stop, the tracker shows two riders near the church in Siebnen, one of the countless small towns around here. Judging by the tracker, they might be in the cemetery — not bad at all. I’m about an hour’s drive away, and on the way I pass through and catch Alice just long enough for a quick photo. Then it’s flat out again toward the small village of Siebnen, as the sky starts to lighten. Bedo Hamza, whom I already caught the night before up in the mountains, rides past — a genuinely nice guy, but since I already have plenty of shots of him, chasing him again is out of the question — not with a cemetery as the alternative.

I’m in Reichenberg now, still missing Büttikon and Schübelbach, then that’s it. Speed limits: 80 outside town, 50 inside. Up, up, up. One red light could make all the difference — they could leave at any moment. As soon as I get into town I see that both Alicia (riding solo) and Alessandro and Ivo (riding as a pair) are sleeping nearby, but it’s not clear whether they’re in a public park or the hotel next to it. I park at random in the empty square and run to check.

After a quick look I give up on them — never mind, they’re probably in the hotel. Damn it, I’m betting everything on Lisa and Julia in the cemetery, as bad as that might sound out loud.

The trap springs

It’s nearly 6am: on a Sunday, the town is deserted even by Swiss standards. I park in front of the church, closing the door softly so as not to wake the two riders — or maybe just for luck. I open the little gate into the graveyard, which wraps around two sides of the building.

Everything is silent, and it starts to rain. I don’t want to wake or scare anyone. I’m practically shaking with anticipation, walking slowly over the paving stones, looking for any sign of human life. Nothing. A slightly creepy scene, honestly, for anyone watching from a window nearby. I pick up the pace, peek behind headstones, check an open garage, try under a covered walkway. Camera in one hand, phone with the tracker in the other. Nothing. So I retrace the last few hours of the race to figure out what I missed: the dots stopped here late last night, then went grey — last update more than four hours ago. So they switched off the little tracker box, and maybe forgot to turn it back on when they left.

I make another pass, this time outside the fence too — maybe there’s a covered area, or somewhere even quieter than the cemetery itself. Still nothing. What now? If they’ve already left, can I catch up with them? I check bakery opening times to intercept them at breakfast, but on a Sunday everything’s shuttered. One last pass, just to be sure, and then I let it go.

Plan B (which is not a plan)

Luck steps in: at 6:37am, while I’m sitting in the car turning over what went wrong at thea cemetery. Dominik messages asking me to check on Karen, who’s stopped a few kilometres ahead. Just worried since the tracker keeps blinking in the middle of nowhere.

A short search later, I find her, and it turns into a nice little scene — “sleeping bag in the grass right off the highway.” Still, I drive home regretting not getting the cemetery bivouac shot I wanted so badly: all experience for next time.

[Spoiler: during VIA race II, barely months later, we’ll fill this cemetery gap with Joanna in Tuscany]

Freedom, anguish, and Kierkegaard's Ass of Buridan

It’s well known that when you’re riding, the hardest day is the third: the initial burst of energy is gone, the excitement of the adventure has already worn off, and at the same time your body hasn’t yet adapted to the rhythm of a long tour or an ultra.

When it comes to photographing three-day events, though — trails like Züri Escape — the hardest day is the second. On two-day events, the start and finish set the rhythm: you have to photograph those two fixed points and everything else naturally falls in around them.

Here, no — the second day sits right in the middle: you can do absolutely anything from dawn to dusk. Riders are spread on the route, far apart. But it’s also the crucial day, the one where you have to pull out the real substance of the coverage. Dominik’s trust — his only instruction being “just do what you do” — doesn’t exactly help here. Without fixed points, it’s that very freedom that causes the anguish: try to chase every rider, and you risk catching none of them — see the example below. Freedom-induced anguish can be paralyzing, and it becomes hard to produce the good photos the job actually needs. 52 hours is a lot, but it’s nowhere near enough to cover the full range of what riders go through across such a vast territory. On top of that, 100 riders — 20 of them in pairs, so really just 80 small dots on the tracker — is very few; you have to go looking for them with a magnifying glass.

A textbook case of Kierkegaardian anguish and paralysis happens to me at Raten, the original destination of that morning before Karen’s detour.

The cheerful Danish philosopher writes — to simplify wildly — that the freedom inherent to the human condition causes existential anguish, and risks paralyzing us. So the famous Ass of Buridan would die of thirst and hunger when at equal distance from two bowls.

Bring that deep reflection down to a much more trivial level, and the concept still holds: faced with a choice, the infinite possibilities we rule out matter more, psychologically, than the single one we actually act on. And that can seriously paralyze you, making you lose both the goat and the cabbages —which is exactly what happens to me at Raten.

By the way, This Kierkegaardian anguish and paralysis is strictly related to FOMO, which we explored here at lenght.

Sunday morning, a few hours after the cemetery, my plan is to head to the Raten pass to catch another group of riders at the little chapel of St. Jost, tucked in a clearing in the woods. I arrive just in time to briefly follow Rebecca past the pass, then head back.

It’s 8am, the light is fairly flat. The paved road cuts across the pass east–west, and where it crosses the gravel track running north–south, there’s a car park with a restaurant. Usually nobody stops right at the bottom of a descent, but a gentle climb starts right after, and more importantly, it’s breakfast time — someone will stop. I start walking up toward the chapel, about a half-hour hike. Since it’s downhill for them, if I cross paths with any riders on the way up, all I’ll get are “action” shots at best. Not much.

One flies past, I don’t catch who; I grab a quick shot, then he stops to eat at the café. I check the tracker — more riders are climbing toward the chapel, but I risk arriving too late and only meeting them on their way back down. After them, there’s a thirty-minute gap with nobody. What now? I’m stuck: do I risk climbing to the chapel for nothing, and then miss breakfast too once I’m back down? Or do I take more photos at the rest stop, even though I already have plenty? It takes 20 minutes to climb to the chapel, but also nearly 10 to get back down to the café. The risk of losing both scenes is real, and it grows with every passing minute.

I decide to go down to the café: I can always go back up to the chapel later, since it’s an obligatory passage point, while once breakfast hour is over — and the finish gets closer — fewer and fewer riders will stop to eat.

In the end it’s the right call — I get a few cozy, satisfying shots, and a couple of hours later I go back up to the chapel, where I get a couple of ordinary but still narratively useful shots. This time I managed to save both the goat and the cabbages — it worked out. I owe myself a beer for that one; noted, for when I reach the finish.

You expect Sergio Leone, you get Lidl car park

Actually, not even that — which would have had its own kind of charm. Car parks and supermarkets have a charm of their own too. The orange Migros signage, for instance, gave a faint sense of place to a couple of photos of Alessandro and Ivo, helped by their matching jerseys; the café gave me the chance for a couple of shots of Marco & Marco, though I’m not fully happy with how those came out.

This case is different. Studying the route, I’d spotted a little gem: a level crossing with a very weathered wooden station house. Thoroughly Wild West, gorgeous. Add a couple of cyclists and you’re instantly in Wyoming, 1880 — how cool is that. One of those spots that earned more than a pin on the map — a mental note too: I’d planned to pass through sometime between day two and three depending on how things went, especially since the crossing also marked the start of a flat stretch through a half-marsh, a distinctive, one-of-a-kind spot on the route.

Except no: the Google image was a few years old, and in the meantime the station had been turned into a concrete block; where there used to be bushes along the tracks, now there’s concrete and railings. Impossible to work with a camera there — a dead spot. On to the next one.

23:30, Gosia stopped. No shops, no shelter. Why there?

Out of sight, out of mind — until the next bend

However hard you try to split your targets by chasing different groups half a day at a time, in the end a few characters keep coming back. It works a bit like a TV series, where every episode has its own story, but there are recurring characters who show up every so often — and eventually you grow attached to them.

[Photos: Wendy, first stop — Entering Niederurnen — deciding whether to scratch — the decision is made.]

At the first useful stop, km50, I meet Wendy, a Cake Movement regular tackling her first Züri Escape. “The rocky sections are exhausting, tarmac has already become my favourite part,” she says while stocking up on coffee and snacks. “There are a lot of flowy grass and meadow sections, my favourites, because they clear my head and I can just fly.” I see her again in the woods later on, and again just before the climb to CP2, when she decides to scratch: the pace being slower than planned has wrecked her schedule, and she wouldn’t make it home in time.

Wendy, first stop

Entering Niederurnen

deciding whether to scratch

The decision is made

Simone and Jonas are also a recurring encounter: on Saturday I find them sheltering from a light drizzle under a portico, snacking. I catch them again in the afternoon on the Tanzboden climb, toward CP1 — actually, just him this time: his girlfriend has scratched and gone to a spa, planning to come back later to tease her sweaty, filthy boyfriend. We cross paths again in the marsh, past the now-renovated Wild West station. A quick chat and I let him go, waiting for the next group. A little later, while gunshots from hunters echo across the hills, I see him pedalling back at full speed. Turns out they’re not hunters: the route runs right past a shooting range, and it seems to be practice time. Better not risk a stray bullet. Jonas takes a paved detour and quickly disappears from view.

While I’m at it, I warn the group coming up behind him, and they take a short detour too. At the finish, Sunday afternoon, I arrive just ahead of Jonas: we say goodbye one last time, as friends.

No people, no party

One reflection is about people. On those same days, I was also following Seven Serpents, and admiring the photos with shepherds, Balkan cars, and interactions with locals. As Lael Wilcox puts it in the documentary about her round-the-world ride: “we ride through the lives of the people we meet”.

Photographically, that perspective is a constant in my own work, though honestly it’s a fairly classic one. It’s fascinating to document a race through the eyes of the outside people who happen to be there in that moment. During VIA Race we had memorable moments all across Italy; even in more formal jobs, it’s happened that a local presence made the photo.

"We ride through the lives of the people we meet"

In Switzerland, though, this almost never happened, simply for lack of people around: so the storytelling here ends up more self-referential overall, aside from a few convivial scenes — though even those weren’t especially interactive.

Mishaps

One low point: the tick I found in the shower on Sunday afternoon. A small souvenir from Switzerland, thankfully with no consequences. Thanks to Jennifer for documenting the moment, and to Red Cross for removing that!

One more thing that didn’t go as I hoped? Double exposures. I’d set out planning to make good use of double exposures, and ended up shooting only two — one mediocre, one decent. Oh well.

After that small sad story, here’s one with a happy ending: when I caught [two riders — names missing in the source] in the rain, I’d also set up a GoPro to grab some clips for Christian, of CdubFilms. Except the GoPro isn’t part of my usual workflow (not enough: I strongly dislike it), so of course, I forgot it, propped up next to a tractor. Late in the afternoon I lost two hours retrieving it, waiting for the quietest moment of the race to drive back and forth to pick it up.

Summing up: Ticks and two thoughts

Let’s close out the Züri Escape report with a positive story — a genuine stroke of luck I only discovered once everything was done: when I ambushed Renzo at the Lidl, I got a shot of him from the front, where the shopping basket reads “rescue me.” Dominik pointed it out when I delivered the work — next time, I’ll need to brush up on my Swiss-German.

What do I take home, besides the fear of a tick-borne infection (thankfully unfounded)?

First, a bit more confidence: Dominik and Fabian gave me free rein, handing over the car and e-bike and telling me “just do what you do, see you Sunday.” Ha. How generous of them. But it worked out — I’m now more aware of what I’m actually capable of, so, thank you.

Second, a fairly obvious confirmation: having two people fully dedicated to driving is the next step for meaningfully improving efficiency and output. Every moment spent checking the tracker, consulting maps, editing the selection on the fly, coordinating with the team, or handling survival logistics — food, water, fuel — is precious time that could already be spent moving, or even shooting. So the ratio between time spent and photos produced would improve. Notes for next time — though working this way already is a rare luxury.

Want a taste of it yourself? Sometimes there’s room for one more person on the job — see my IG bio for upcoming assignments.

Or, register to the upcoming workshop: also see IG for the latest news.

Tech note and some numbers

On the gear side, I had a car and an e-bike available — I barely used the e-bike, but it was decisive when I did. In my kit I brought the 40-150 f2.8, barely used (under 200 shots out of 4000) — I might have saved some weight and bulk bringing the 35-100 instead. Meanwhile I’m getting more and more use out of the 17mm and 45mm PRO lenses, helped along by an issue with the 12-40 (possibly a knock) that I’ll send in for service as soon as I can. The OM-1 II is extremely comfortable, even if that near-invisible green viewfinder display makes me want to throw it in the river sometimes. The E-M1 III is just as comfortable, apart from its startup time — see aforementioned river. The perfect camera doesn’t exist, but the work still gets done well enough.

I close out Züri Escape with 7 hours of sleep across 2 nights, 550km driven, 60km ridden, plus who knows how many on foot (damn Switzerland and its roads closed to vehicles!), 4,000 total shots and a final edit of around 500; a few new friends, and an event told as well as we could, together with my colleague Jennifer and the rest of this fantastic team.

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L'articolo Stories from Züri Escape: surveying fails, cemeteries on AirBnB, and Kierkegaard proviene da Cicloreporter - sport photography and storytelling.

The game of investigation, pt. 1: looking for riders amidst chaos

Efrezet — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 08:59:39 +0000

The game of investigation, pt. 1: looking for riders amidst chaos

The thrill of investigation

Finding riders is bloody hard, I think while we drive through Abruzzo with Ryan, around 10am. Coffee break, quick refill, toilet, then we keep rolling. It’s already hot, low 40s. Riders haven’t been lucky, with heatwaves following them in Spain and France, and a “normal” heat in Italy now. In our tiny car, we sweat since days, not unlike those who pedal.

It took me only one day to change my perspective. While facing my very first ultra coverage, I clearly underestimated the phase of chasing riders. I am not without experience, but finding 250 riders on a 500km race is NOT like finding 120 riders scattered over 4000km across different states. Oh, yes, and there is no fixed route. It’s a whole different thing.

Generally speaking, the time you spend shooting is nothing compared to the time spent not shooting. Exploring the challenges of FOMO, we already said that an ultrarace is basically nowhere: indeed, you spend a lot of time looking for riders, and a very little time with your camera in hand.

On bad days you can end up with 2 or 3 riders covered, and it feels very bad. But that’s part of the game. You don’t have to think about one day, but the whole race. This should be your criteria to evaluate a day’s work. Still, when you miss a shooting, you feel all of it.

Failing

At times, you think a rider will come, but that never happens. You have a nice framing, maybe you drove some Kms to intercept him, and you come out with nothing. Part of the game. Most likely you will not even understand how that happened. During VIA II, we spent hours – literally 3 hours – looking for Adriano** in the Netherlands. Three guys with the head down on the tracker, camera in hand, wandering around a couple blocks. The dot was stopped somewhere near a restaurant, a park, a parking, and a farm. We found a horse and a chinese restaurant chef. The dot kept moving between those places – we searched all them, but nothing. Twice. At one point, the tracker showed him 20km farther, out of the blue, and out of our range. What a pity. We were mad.

Quite often, the tracker is not reliable — meaning the GPS signal itself is spotty:

in the city, tall buildings make it work less effectively
in the woods, tree cover blocks it
in the mountains? You guess.

On top of that, even a good GPS fix is useless without a phone signal to send it — and that’s its own lottery: remote areas, international (and sometimes limited) roaming, and so on.

This knowledge – in italian we say fare la tara, something like calibrate, or adjust something according to external parameters – comes with experience, and you learn to fill the gaps of this digital information. Still, as the episode at the cemetery during Zuri Escape shows, it leads to some mistakes.

My biggest regret related to VIA chapter I has been not having found Rob Roy on the crossing of the Apennines, North to South. The day after leaving the Pianura Padana, we were in central Italy, following the first bunch of riders – roughly from the 3rd to the 12th.

Ryan and me are in the area, a bit south of Pistoia, the town where all the riders end up after coming down from the pass. We have a few hours to spare before another shooting more South, in Tuscany. We decide to go back a bit and wait for Krystian (cap145), one of the top riders.

We should be back to Pistoia exactly when he arrives from the pass. Unfortunately, he stops in a hotel in downtown before we can catch him. We can only park the car in front, double-check the tracker, and close that chapter: he will start riding again in the night, but we will be away at that time. So he’s out of reach.

Thursday 21:30

Friday 05:00

Anyway, other riders are crossing Vidiciatico, the mandatory checkpoint, so we have other chances to shoot something in the mountains.

Our next opportunity is Rob Roy, who follows the same route as Krystian. Instead of waiting for him in town, we go up to meet him in the mountains. The chase starts, we immediately dive in a thick forest north of Pistoia, on tiny roads. The dot is at a crossroad at about 1000m elevation and isn’t moving since half an hour. We guess, self-reassuringly, an afternoon nap.

At the crossroad, we can’t find him: there is a food truck, so the spot is perfect for a short break; but no trace of him. Yet the dot is there. Suddenly, we see it on a secondary road, down towards the city. Oh yes, in the woods, it doesn’t work well. We try to chase him, but out of nowhere we stumble into a crowded picnic area surrounded by trees and by traffic jams. We lose a lot of time stuck in traffic (hey guys, ride your bikes next time!). Then, downhill, he’s way faster than us. Plus, the tracker is still spotty, and following him in town is basically random. Frustrated for our second fail, we give up and prepare for the next shooting. Missed Krystian, missed Rob.

Later that evening, the organization tell us that up in that crossroad Rob Roy literally saved a life by complete chance: an old man was sitting on a wall, losing his balance and holding on for bare life about to fall into the void – Rob ran, pulled him away and escorted him home. What a story we missed!

Waiting and investigating

Like in a police game, shooting an ultra involves a lot of stakeouts.

At first, my waiting is for the entire race to reach Italy, where my assignment starts. I must cover the second half of VIA, from the French border to the finish in Giovinazzo. Struck by heatwaves first in Spain then in France, the pack is late, and the timetable is delayed by 24hrs. I am impatient and I feel useless: while my colleagues are either chasing stories on the road or taking portraits at the first Refuge, I can only double-check my equipment while keeping an obsessive eye to the dots and to the organization chat. Like a dormant spy, I wait for the signal to engage.

When Adam, the leader, chooses the hike-a-bike to the mandatory “gate” at Colle del Nivolet (2.700m altitude) instead of coming to the Velodrome before climbing the road pass, this means some extra hours before I engage: a cruel punishment. He is very fast, covering more than 400k per day; yet the dot is unbearably slow.

Eventually, he gets to the trail. Time to start working… which means another set of wait-and-see procedures starts. I pick up Ryan at the Velodrome and we climb to the Nivolet, constantly checking on Adam’s progress. In the valley, the GPS is not reliable, we can only guess his speed on the hike-a-bike. Plus, after the hiking section there are two options: a military road, smoother but requiring some extra climbing; and a flowy single track, lower but a bit rougher. Even on the very summit, we could miss him by choosing the wrong track. When we reach the big, wooden cross signaling the end of the climb, the tracker is mute. Is he already behind us? Did we really miss him on a summit? Even if the calculations seem reasonable, our worry increases rapidly; the powerless waiting makes it harder. Do we have a plan B?

You can guess how relieved we feel when the tracker updates and show Adam at the beginning of the hiking trail.

The following days, we play this stakeout game with the other riders. As soon as you engage, at every shooting, a real investigation takes place. The tracker provides the general information, but is useless without many other pieces of the puzzle: what is the refuelling logistics of the rider? When did he stop for sleeping last time? What’s his sleeping habit? Do we know whether he had a mechanical? What kind of food does he/she prefer? What kind of road is he/she more likely to ride, based on the background?

Watching the dots gives you the 80% of the information. But without the other 20% the shooting doesn’t happen, so it’s pretty useless without this groundwork. Which is a proper investigation, made of joining clues, guessing motives and patterns, gathering information from whatever source you find. You try to gather information, make calculations, guess, and wait for the rider at some spot.

There’s suspense and stress as you approach your target, hoping your deduction is right. There’s relief when you see the silhouette of the rider coming to you, and frustration when you realize he is past you or he chose another route. There’s an immense satisfaction when you trap the rider – you know you’re in the right place, and you can work the scene.

The soundtrack is Tick of the clock, by Chromatics. Or some Hitchcock soundrack if you’re into the classics. In these moments you feel all the responsibility you have towards the organization and the riders. There is frustration when you don’t find anybody, but the first shooting on Nivolet is an encouraging start.

Succeeding

A special kind of satisfaction is when you spot a stopped dot, and you try to catch it before it goes away. You try hard to understand the reason of the stop, and you calculate in consequence. The tracker can tell you if it’s some food place, or some shelter to sleep. But it cannot tell you if it’s a mechanical or other exceptional situation. After a while, you spot anomalies at once.

So, when we see Gosia’s dot at a crossroad between a Strada Statale and a local road in Veneto, with no shops around, at 11PM, we know something’s happening. Her and Joanna are battling for the first place since the start, and they both stopped for a brake issue in Bologna. We push on our VW Westphalia to reach her as quickly as possible, even ignoring Matt, who’s coming straight toward us from the opposite direction. We will catch him afterwards, if possible (spoiler, we will).

23:30, Gosia stopped. No shops, no shelter. Why there?

As we approach the dot, we don’t see her immediately: but then her silhouette appears, sitting down side-by-side with the bike, almost in the middle of the road. The wheel is off. She had a puncture – the 10th or so that day – and is out of tubes, out of patches, out of solutions. So we park the van, we start shooting. At first, we are silent, no interference. Then we start asking questions, half in English, half Italian, some German words, and a few Polish bonuses. She’s in good mood, as usual. Abenteuer, adventure, she keeps telling us.

Her story ends up happily – see the reflections about interference (link) – and our shooting even more so: to give absolute closure to that day, we catch her riding towards the fireworks of a local celebration.

Not every catch comes from detective work. Satisfaction also comes from unexpected situations. In Freiburg we are just passing by, it’s a transfer between the second refuge in St. Gallen and the last real climb of VIA second chapter, Grand Ballon in France. It wouldn’t deserve a detour if we weren’t there anyway.

Among the few riders that are also crossing the town we spot Rafael Ospino, a dear friend of mine – we met during Chapter I, and I know how he rides. Even though we had already a couple shootings with him, we decide to stop for a chat while he – we assume – eats near the station. The location is poor, the light is poor, so it’s more about saying hello.

He tells us he wasn’t mentally in good shape for the last couple days, and only that day he was feeling better. At one point he shows us his talisman, related to a family history going on from generations, before taking off to France. A small yet moving personal moment that would have well been worth a detour.

Teaming up

As in any proper investigation, the team work is crucial. You are in constant contact with the rest of the media team, the organisation, and the dotwatchers. To make it work, everyone has to feed information regularly. The tracking map shows you dots on the move, but only information tells you how they move and where they will be.

Information is gathered, slowly but steadily – She stopped this morning at a grocery, he always sleeps in public parks, he won’t stop for a while ‘cause he’s chasing this guy. The ultracycling community is not exactly huge, so there’s always someone in the organization acquainted with the rider. This is precious – unless you know the rider yourself – to understand his/her behavior, which is crucial: if the rider is vegan, for example, the range of places for refill is way narrower. Joanna is a night rider, so we can count on this when we make our plans. Gert Jan is a connoisseur of Italy, so we’ll look for him in the pasticcerie and cafés in the city center rather than gas stations. Everyone loves gelato, so when you see a gelateria, you know you can stop and riders will come to you sooner or later.

Indeed, you talk with local shopkeepers, asking if they saw this rider, exactly like a police movie.

Other intel comes from rider themselves. Even though small bits, you see them, you understand how they feel. This helps evaluating more accurately how the rider will perform, making it easier to find him next time. Day after day, your understanding of the “big picture” becomes clearer, and your accuracy increases.

The pieces come together, and with a bit of luck you find what you look for, and the shooting can happen. But as you see, it’s only the last phase of a complex process, the classical tip of the iceberg.

Sometimes, it’s exciting, because we all love investigating; other times, it’s boring as hell. For example, when you must keep an alarm every 30min to check if the rider stops for a nap or keeps riding.

(foto)Waiting night during VIA II, at the border between Austria and Slovenia. In the van, Francesco waits for Bruno and Adam to finish the race and send the celebration post on social media. Marco and I check on the nearby riders to see if they keep riding in the night or stop for a nap.

And, some other times, all this conjecturing is totally useless, and you have to simply go with the flow, or with your gut, or whatever, and things will happen around you. There are moments where serendipity is the only way, and you learn to see them. There are so many factors in place that luck has also an important role. But maybe it’s not only luck, it’s instinct.

I don’t really know, but oh God, I love this game, perhaps more than the shooting itself. And sometimes more than riding myself.

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L'articolo The game of investigation, pt. 1: looking for riders amidst chaos proviene da Cicloreporter - sport photography and storytelling.

Reality, fiction, and the plausible: Roy DeCarava’s “Sweet flypaper of life” [1955]

Efrezet — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 12:35:00 +0000

Reality, fiction, and the plausible: Roy DeCarava's "Sweet flypaper of life" [1955]

What is Sweet Flypaper of Life, and why we talk about life?

“When the bicycle of the Lord carrying His messenger with a telegram to Sister Mary Bradley saying COME HOME arrived at 113 West 134th Street in New York, Sister Mary said, Boy, take that telegram straight back to Saint Peter because I am not ready to come. I may be a little weak, but I sure ain’t tired. And she refused even to sign for the message.”

I felt that the discussion about Paul Fusco’s RFK Funeral train needed some counterweight, and this is the perfect reportage for it. Of course, it’s not only this: DeCarava’s work is great to explore the complicated relationship between Reality, Fiction, and the plausible. Indeed, this is a fascinating topic to me, and a recurring subject of conversation with my friends and colleagues. To be honest, every time I work with my camera in hand, I am puzzled by the intertwining of facts, fantasy, and storytelling.

This is also a very relatable work for us on the bike, of course. Even though I didn’t plan for the opening to feature a bicycle, I swear: it’s only a very fortunate coincidence.

Back to the topic: The Sweet Flypaper of Life is a singular — perhaps unique — work whose text begins directly on the cover. Its title refers to life – yes, life – because it’s deadly, yet we are attracted to it and we run into it as hard as we can. I fell in love with the metaphor, for starters.

The book is a very small format, photo-wise; its 140 little pages are a mixture of black-and-white photographs and lines of a poem written by Langston Hughes, DeCarava’s friend. Together, words and images tell the story of ordinary people living ordinary lives in Harlem; it’s the story of a black family told by Sister Mary Bradley through a monologue: boys gathered around a jukebox, children playing around an open fire hydrant; riding the subway alone at night, workers on picket lines, artists in their studios, wise daughters, lazy nephews, more or less successful marriages, neighborhood life. The photographs are a mix of portraits and street scenes, something that could become a social reportage about daily life in Harlem across the 1940s and the 1950s.

Roy DeCarava (1919–2009), renowned photographer of the New York jazz scene and the first African American to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship, documented daily life in his Harlem neighborhood during the 1940s and 1950s.

Langston Hughes (1901–1967), writer, journalist, poet, and another central figure of the Harlem Renaissance.

Beyond reality and fiction, the Plausible

What makes this minor work a masterpiece is that DeCarava choose instead to build a novel: with this real photographs – something that genuinely document facts – with an invented poem. DeCarava’s vision — at least in this small work — is not political or social, but existential. He does not consider himself a photojournalist; he sees himself as an artist investigating human life. As he himself said:

“I’m not a documentarian, I never have been. I think of myself as poetic, a maker of visions, dreams, and a few nightmares.” *

* (To be clear, DeCarava was fully aware of the relationship between politics and photography, especially in relation to his African American identity, and he was active on many fronts; see the 1990 interview for Callaloo.)

Unlike the photographers of the Farm Security Administration, for example, DeCarava does not seek absolute objectivity, or pure description; in fact, he criticizes the very pursuit of it.

Sweet Flypaper of Life is an experiment towards this idea. DeCarava hands over his photographic archive — hundreds if not thousands, accumulated over the years — to his friend Langston Hughes, asking him to edit the images and write a story around them.

The result is a very personal narrative in which photographs and text support one another – a very ambiguous work, playing on the very concepts of reality and fiction. The words function as captions, but they also carry the story forward, while the images in turn explain the text. It is a perfect symbiosis that creates an atmosphere suspended between facts and fantasy.

The stories woven through those hundred pages are entirely plausible, because every photograph portrays neighbors and acquaintances; yet their sequence is subjective, and together they form a fictional story: based on reality, but not real. Potentially true stories, perfectly suited to the context, but that never actually happened.

From plausible to symbolic, from objective to subjective

The outcome of this combination is something totally different from their simple sum: objective reality changes according to arbitrary connections, thus becomesH subjective. So, the story of Sister Mary Bradley, which is not real but could have been, becomes a symbol – a universal story. When asked about this evocative quality of his work, DeCarava has no hesitation:

“Of course, my work is very spiritual. It is not about matter; matter is the instrument through which I express my spirituality. I take the tangible and present the intangible” – he seems to refer directly to this passage from real photos to plausible universality through fictional text. “This is the spirit of man, the spirit of many, many, many things, many moments. […] This is the grace of the human being: that we can transcend our bodily nature and become something else, something greater than ourselves.”

Subjective yet not particular: storytelling

A symbol is, by nature, subjective: it is up to the reader to connect it to something, trace it back to a real experience; this way, each one of us completes it with a meaning. He insists on this point, arguing against a “descriptive” photography: pictures “have something of me in them. […] I try to put as much of myself into the photograph as possible, because that is the subject. It is not so much the object itself as my relationship to the subject.”

The risk here is that subjective becomes mute – perhaps the most feared danger in all photography. How many pics are dear to us, but don’t tell a thing to others? Did I hear somebody whispering wedding album?

How do the two avoid this? The magic depends on delicacy, awareness, sensitivity, and other human qualities; however, there are useful things we can learn and borrow.

First, DeCarava gives up his subjectivity to his friend, thus reducing the risk of being self-referential. As far as we know, Hughes might have discarded all the photos DeCarava liked best.

Second, DeCarava and Hughes guide us through a narrative: they choose one among the many possible, and a very specific one. They narrow the field for us, so that we are not lost in endless fantasy. We meet Sister Mary Bradley (not a woman), her family, her children, daughters-in-law, grandchildren, the commuter on the subway, the music they listen to: Rodney, Ellen, the painter neighboor, the songs, the streets. We are engaged because it is a story – one story. If the captions were merely descriptive, we would be lost after three pages.

Third, at the same time, the very particular is balanced with the universal — this is what produces the plausible (or the symbolic; perhaps two words for the same idea): the everyday life is ours, the street corner is where we used to meet friends after school. The story is full of hints, suggestions, even songs – things that open the story to the reader. With a single picture, we are free to interpret it and to attach a specific meaning. But put pictures together, and it becomes a narrative: the interpretations decrease, but we are more likely to be engaged, we can relate to rather than interpret.

Rafael Ospino, VIA race I and II

We met Rafa in 2024, shooting his journey in a couple occasions, including his random meeting with Momo, former colleague of Marco Pantani's Sister.

In 2025 we met again, shooting since before the start of the race and then till the last climb in France, Grand Ballon.

His challenges to take part in VIA, his unexpected results, and his daily rides - can build a special story many ordinary cyclists like us can identify with.

Symbols and everyday scenes: small things

To activate this symbolic mechanism, he cannot speak about the extraordinary, about conquest and victory; he speaks about the ordinary, about small things that are evocative for each of us:

“My work concerns what I consider essential: the sun, time, patience, waiting long enough. […] My work is not about strength, not about conquest. […] Many great works are made to overwhelm you. They are aggressive. They are beautiful works, if you like aggression. But they are made to take control, to dominate you. That is not satisfying to me. I want people to come because they want to, and leave because they want to.”

The images have grace, of course. They are beautiful, they are good, they work. But most are simple photographs, and also not perfect, blurred, too dark. There is a great deal to learn from this as well: there is no spectacular Steve McCurry composition and color contrast, no incredible Alex Webb layering, no decisive moment.

Now place this statement next to one by Camille J. MacMillan, a photographer of professional cycling and a veteran of the Tour de France and the six-day track races.

He too is not interested in conquest or strength; he prefers to focus on the small stories in the shadows: athletes changing behind a team van, or relaxing after the race.

“There’s more to cycling than the epic shot — the lone rider on a mountain pass, blah blah blah… Let’s go tell some real stories.”

Let’s go tell some real stories — or better, some plausible ones.

Two ways I relate to this topic

There’s a lot to think about, thanks to DeCarava and Hughes. But let’s try to go at the heart of his work as it concerns us as cyclists. As I said, I am faced with this intriguing subject every time I shoot. However, not always in the same way. During races and events, the main concern is about the plausibility of the single picture, as Inigo shows: I try to document a fact, but leave some room for interpretation, so that viewers can relate to that. Viewers usually like Inigo Hawkins’ photo because, they say, many things happen. It’s clear that something happened, but it’s unclear what. The emptiness of the room, the remnants on the table, and the external point of view (through the large window, with some reflections of the wood in front) nudge us towards one of several possible stories.

On the contrary, when the shooting is about territory promotion or tour operators, I focus more on the narrative, trying to build a story of a possible traveller/guest. As a result, I focus more on small situations, details, and anything useful to that plausible story we are making up.

When I shoot for Tourissimo (see below), a tour operator whose target audience is people who enjoy Italian food and folklore, I try to catch (the food, obviously; and) the natural beauty of the everyday sights, rather than the majestic monuments: the idea of what Italy can be for an American cyclist.

In both cases, I am persuaded that this “plausible story” we build has nothing to do with a “lesser reality”, as if it were “the reportage I would have wanted to do, but I couldn’t accomplish”. It’s not a surrogate for a social documentary – it is something substantially different. More poetic, more symbolic, more universal. Actually, social reportages are incredible works, but they are limited to that situation by their own definition.

Three lessons from Sweet Flypaper of Life when we ride our bike

Besides my personal experience, this work is inspiring in many ways, three of which are:

1. A structure worth borrowing

First, and very simply: the combination of text and photographs constructed in this way is a fascinating option for telling the story of a journey. Difficult, certainly, but fascinating. Let’s try and borrow it!

2. Small and subjective rather than epic and objective

Second (but strictly related), we don’t need “big stuff” to tell a story. Attention to small, ordinary, everyday things is a theme I encounter again and again in photographers I admire, and one in which I recognize myself (with all due proportions). Not only trivial situations offer countless narrative possibilities, but also, they speak to everyone. On the contrary, exceptional situations don’t allow for many interpretations, and we are less likely to identify with them, because they show “exclusive” situations.

Also, and also strictly related: we don’t need to seek objectivity while we document our trip. We are the subjects living the journey, and the story will be richer if we are present in our pictures in some form. After all, we live the cycling adventure through our bodies — we shoot with them, we see and think with them.

3. Hope: we don't always need a project before leaving

Third, the process and the project. DeCarava hands over his accumulated archive of photographs and asks someone else to give it meaning. There is no real project at the beginning; it emerges afterward, even years after. This gives us hope: we always hear “shoot with a project in mind”, but having a project is very hard. Hey, I’m travelling by bike, things just happen to me. What project? And we feel inadequate. Yet, we can also look at our archive in hindsight, and build a narrative that fits one part of our adventures. Most likely, we will discover unexpected threads running through our photos over time. Those recurring themes often reveal a great deal about us, about the way we perceive things, more than about the things themselves.

In the end, DeCarava’s question was spot on: how much of ourselves is in our pictures?

To explore further

Industry: a quick detour

2 Ottobre 2026Logs/reports, Personal Project, Stories and tellers

Where to find interesting stories? Quick answer: where things and people are on the move.

Alternative Altitude Alps

21 Settembre 2026Personal Project, Stories and tellers

A 400km, 14.000mt offroad bikepacking route. Why did we think that was a good thing?

Turning constraints into narrative keys: Paul Fusco’s Kennedy’s Funeral Train [1968]

28 Luglio 2026Stories and tellers, tools/techniques

The italian saying is "fare di necessità virtù": a classic reportage and what it can teach us about cycling photography

Everything everywhere all at once – dealing with FOMO during ultracycling coverage

Efrezet — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 13:31:18 +0000

Everything everywhere all at once - dealing with FOMO during ultracycling coverage

Riding an ultra vs shooting an ultra

Before any ultracycling shooting, I have only two expectations. First, it will be a great deal of fun (type 3 fun, we’ll talk about that next time); second, it will be harder to cover than to ride, both physically and emotionally. This second point improves with experience, but only slightly.

When you ride your bike in an ultra, the challenges are far from easy, yet they are simple: you start with a plan and a route already, and you adjust the strategy as you proceed. All along the way, you have very few worries. Finding water, food and shelter, and managing the fatigue, the bad weather, mechanical issues, and sheer bad luck. Clear priorities, simple stuff. The beauty of cycling, clearly visible in the cool t-shirts “ride, eat, sleep, repeat.”

Basically, it’s harder than riding because you have so many things to do. This is why ultracycling is cool per se, but ultrashooting needs a different approach if you hope to enjoy it.

As a media crew, on the other side, you are not on your own: you have the responsibility to document the adventure of many riders (all of them, ideally). As we saw, you have to investigate, guessing each rider’s next stop; you must wait, coordinate with the team, elaborate the three-level plan (what’s your next move? What does that imply for the following 12 hours? And what for the next couple of days?), and then update it regularly; you must take care of your own logistics (fuel, food, vignettes, international roaming), your basic hygiene, and the rest of the team. A ton of silly stuff that is not shooting, yet still necessary.

Then you also have to do the shooting itself, which opens another whole set of processes: finding intel about the rider and their story within the race and prior to it, if you don’t know them already; backing up the files, editing, interviewing, sending files, creating content. All of this while you’re on the road, the usually with shitty internet.

Then, if you are not busy with any of this, you can do stuff which is not strictly necessary, but it’s worth doing: for example, B-rolls and behind-the-scenes; or a shower; or writing notes for some future article.

This is why ultracycling is cool per se, but ultrashooting needs a different approach if you hope to enjoy it.

FOMO - the king of them all

My special enemy, though, is not chaos. I thrive in situations where you must improvise and have to take decisions without really knowing what will be the consequences, trying to guess how the tracking map will look in the next few hours. Not afraid of that.

What I fear is missing stories.

Since riders will be doing anything, anywhere, anytime, there always will be a story within reach. And it’s very hard to stop and say – wait, I have to sleep, we’ll see tomorrow. Riders who ride, riders who sleep in improvised shelters (fascinating, and I have a few items to add to the collection: hotels – check, benches – check, cemetery – check, but still many creative places to find).

With a list so long of riders to catch, FOMO, fear of missing out, is my main enemy on the job – the king of all challenges. I had the same feeling as a kid (don’t we all?), forced to go to bed while the adults kept talking and having fun: am I missing some good joke? I want to hear again Aunt’s funny story! Please don’t have fun without me.

At the end of the day, there’s always one more rider to catch, one more spot to check. How can you say no? It’s only 60 or 90kms away, a couple hours driving: how to resist?

If you’ve been to Disneyland, you know what I’m talking about: wanting to jump on all rollercoasters, see all the shows, explore every corner of the Far West area – all at once.

But hey, where is all this fun in an unsupported race across a continent? In his book, James Robertson writes that an ultrarace is basically nowhere. You just have a couple riders here and there, hundreds of kms between each other; along the way, few people notice, none care.

However, we can go one step further: if the race is nowhere, it means that it can be anywhere. Therefore, you can’t afford to sleep and lose time. And that’s a big issue, one I fell right into during VIA chapter I, in 2024.

If you let the ultrarace get you, it’s easy to lose focus and, eventually, to be less effective. A couple examples. For a whole day, during VIA I, one of my cameras was set with SAF, single autofocus, instead of CAF, continuous. I realized it only at night, when this became more problematic. I don’t know why or how it happened, since I use SAF very rarely. Luckily, the shootings aren’t as dynamic as the word “race” suggests, otherwise I would lose several pictures. If I weren’t so sleepy, I would have noticed earlier.

Another mistake due to the lack of sleep has a direct impact on this article. During VIA I – yes, there I made all of the rookie mistakes, or at least a lot of them – I sent myself whatsapp voicenotes: commentaries, funny quotes, and so on, mainly for IG stories, and to write an article afterwards. For reasons unknown to me, these notes were set to delete after 24hrs. I found out when I was back home, two weeks after the race. Gone.

During that assignment, I slept 2-3 hours per day, plus a few 15-minutes powernaps when possible. When I ride ultra, I usually sleep 4 hours minimum, and even more if it’s more than a couple days.

Unsurprisingly, that wasn’t nearly enough. The truth is, you cannot be efficient when you sleep 2-3 hours for several days. After a few days, true to my rookie pedigree, I was struggling. As a rider I can manage myself a bit better, and stop before it’s too late. But as a photographer, I fell in the trap. A couple times, I had to stop to take a quick nap, even if we were in the middle of action.

More about "photography/philosophy"

The negative value of surveying

FOMO and Checkpoints

The checkpoints (or Refuges, as VIA names them) and the finish are the most dangerous trap when it comes to FOMO: they are a goldmine for stories and “letting go” is particularly hard. If it’s hard to feel the race on the road, at the Refuge it’s everywhere, you can literally touch it. Losing any of these precious moments would be a crime. How can you dare to sleep?

You get all riders, which makes it very democratic media-wise. It’s where they take a break, both physical and mental. So, it’s also where they unleash all the stress, opening the gates for all sorts of emotions. When cycling, we are all the same more or less. But when you get off the bike, and you’re exhausted, that’s when your self is most exposed – the most interesting things to tell. Countless interesting tales.

Plus, they do all sort of stuff off the bike, which makes for interesting situations. Washing, reorganizing the bags, repairing, interacting, and so on. In these places, pictures and stories come alive.

Bonus: riders usually follow a pattern, so you can sort of plan your shoots, wait for another rider to do the same thing in a better light, or even play with the scene. It’s Disneyland when you can do whatever you like.

But that’s not all: volunteers themselves are a great subject for storytelling; without them, the race simply couldn’t happen, and most of the time their stories are as interesting as the riders’. They’re the landlords of the place, so it’s interesting to observe their management. Or simply to hear their stories, like Sister Kerstin, the gravel-riding nun who mocks “Gucci Gravel riders” and enjoys a few laps on the Velodrome.

The locations themselves are also interesting: during Chapter II, the headquarter of The Cake Movement, in St. Gallen, was fascinating – something that our colleague Elias, assigned to the place, perfectly took advantage of. An astonishing historic building, its wooden walls painted in bright yellow and red immediately make you feel in a special place. The welcome is warm, the cappuccino one of the best. The shower was hot, something riders really appreciated during these days of cold and rain. Us three, unfortunately, we had to take a quick shower and take off to the next chase in Freiburg (Luckily, in 2026 I could quench my thirst for pics in that building while working on Backyard Gravel).

Back to FOMO and checkpoints. During VIA I, I spent 3 nights at Velodromo Francone, sleeping on the camp beds with volunteers and riders. At day, I chased riders along Val di Susa; coming back at night, a different kind of fun started. No more wait-and-see: riders were already there for me! The fact that we were 3 or 4 photographers/videomakers (the Velodromo was also the race HQ for a couple days) didn’t diminish the fear of missing out. While a colleague is shooting this, let’s try that. If he’s shooting the refueling maneuvers, I can go for the behind-the-scenes chat between volunteers. When nothing happens – but wait, something is happening at all times.

As a result, after three days at Velodromo I am already exhausted. My teammate and passenger Ryan Le Garrec, having covered the race from the start, is also quite exhausted; he compensates with experience, and knows when it’s time to stop. I don’t know yet, and this costs us some time.

The last day it’s time to leave and reach the front of the race in Pistoia, but I am too tired to drive safely all night long. We just have to postpone and rest a few hours, which will cost 100k extra, since Chris started riding in pitch black and he’s already near the Apennines. Overall, it doesn’t compromise anything of the coverage, but it teaches me a lesson, as Ryan points out.

At the finish line, history repeats, but the rhythm is very different. The finish of Chapter 1 and the start of Chapter 2 was the town of Giovinazzo, offering endless shooting options with its ancient city center and typical white walls. At the end of Chapter I, riders would enjoy the rest and the summer, looking for local food and waiting for their families and friends.

Most of all, at the finish, there are heavy loads of emotions unfolding. One by one, riders stop the GPS, and a whole world falls apart – the world where you are alone for most of the day, riding through the landscape barely seeing it – and is replaced by something new and unknown. Crying is the normal reaction, and every emotion is heightened by the fatigue.

Then, after a couple days of rest, it becomes a holiday: the faces relax, the bodies recover, and there’s yet another mood to shoot. Giovinazzo and De Proloog, the finish of the first and of the second chapters, are worlds apart; yet the pictures show the same feelings.

At the finish line, fear of missing out becomes peaceful concentration. You rest more, you feel the end of the task, and you can finally enjoy chatting with riders without worrying about external support.

On the other side, Giovinazzo has a completely different feeling when Chapter II starts from the very same square, buzzing with last-minute bike check and personal rituals. And again, so many things to shoot. Let’s start for another round.

FOMO and being effective: letting go

This is probably the most important lesson of that very first ultra. From there on, and especially during the second chapter of VIA, in 2025, I adapted the sleeping routine for the “shooting mode” rather than the “cycling mode”. We slept 4-5 hours per night, with a couple full nights of 6-8 hours along the way, and random power naps when possible. We supported each other, but also stopped each other when one of us felt it was too much. It has been way better, and I think we did a better job overall.

The hard stuff has been learning to “let go”, to stop before we were too tired. Because maybe doing a 2 hours detour for the next rider pays in the very short term, but the price is very high for the following days. If you do it, it has to be really meaningful.

Since then, I am able to manage my energies much better, even when I cover races alone. Each time I see a rider approaching on the tracker and it’s time to rest, I make an effort and try to weigh the long game, not just the next hour.

During Three Peaks Bike Race, in 2026, I was alone in Col de la Loze for 4 days: on thursday evening, I had to decide: either waiting for the last riders into the night, and then skip the dawn; or skip the few night riders, hoping that dawn would be more fruitful (both about light and riders).

See the screenshot here (I am based at the green mountain icon, low right, where Col de la Loze is. Riders climb the parcours anti-clockwise starting in Brides-les-Bains, up-left, where you see the crowd of dots):

Thursday evening I see four riders coming up. The climb takes 2 to 4 hours depending on the rider. It means I could stay awake for 273 (sure), then 113 (maybe), but besides that (235, 320, 267) it would mean a sleepless night.
it was way better to sleep early evening and wake up early, since a crowd is coming. Even 235, who was already on the parcours at 21.30 pm, is on top at dawn.

(source: Dotwatcher.com)

Thursday 21:30

Friday 05:00

Instinct, experience and a few clues made me decide for the second option. It was a hard decision not to hear Aunt’s last story. It paid off: I lost a few riders but I covered many more before breakfast, and with a great light.

More thoughts about ultrashooting

Stories from Züri Escape: surveying fails, cemeteries on AirBnB, and Kierkegaard

27 Luglio 2026Logs/reports, Philo/photo, Ultrashooting

Short stories from the field: people, places, and cemeteries, with some reflections on all this.

The game of investigation, pt. 1: looking for riders amidst chaos

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How do you actually find riders, and what do you do when you find them?

Everything everywhere all at once – dealing with FOMO during ultracycling coverage

22 Giugno 2026tools/techniques, Ultrashooting

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L'articolo Everything everywhere all at once – dealing with FOMO during ultracycling coverage proviene da Cicloreporter - sport photography and storytelling.

Unsupported races and media interference, pt2. Ethical solutions

Efrezet — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 18:04:44 +0000

Unsupported races and media interference, pt2. Ethical solutions

Gosia Warelick / unsupported and intention

Even leaving out the media crew question, “unsupported” is far from clear. Consider this VIA rule: “ensure that any non-public source of resupply or acquired service is unsolicited and unplanned.” Now compare it with the TBR rule: “Given the nature of the Balkans, if locals spontaneously offer food, water, or a place to sleep, this is part of the spirit of the race and is allowed. However, actively seeking such help counts as support and breaks the rule.”

Setting aside the fact that “given the nature of the Balkans” establishes an exception — which is not a strong foundation for any rule (you can find generous people anywhere, as every cyclist knows) — both rules hinge on the intention of the rider: unsolicited, actively seeking. That’s a step forward, but is it enough to draw a clear line?

Take Gosia’s situation.

11pm, Veneto, empty strada statale. We find Gosia on the roadside trying to repair a puncture. Despite being out of tubes, her mood is her usual self: abenteuer, she keeps saying with a big smile — adventure. We document the whole scene for half an hour, chatting about her route so far: videos, photos, a quick interview. At one point, a shining white convertible approaches. Two guys are on their way to a party in town, but curiosity wins out. From their faces, we can tell they suspect a crash between the bike and our van, parked a few meters away. Gosia reassures them in a mix of English, Polish, German, and Italian. The conversation is friendly.

When they wave goodbye and pull away, Gosia gets back to her tyre problem. We are about to leave when we see the convertible returning. “Ecco qui,” the passenger says, holding out a couple of inner tubes. “That’s what I have in my garage. I’m not a cyclist, but maybe one of them fits. Good luck.”

Gosia can keep riding.

Where is the solicitation here? The driver understood that Gosia had a problem and offered a solution spontaneously. Or did he? Even though Gosia didn’t actively seek help, her situation was obvious: all over the world, a cyclist with a puncture is a “help me” signal that requires no words, no intention, no active seeking to be understood. It is self-evident. So what should she do — refuse the spare tubes? That would be absurd from any human standpoint, and it would set a troubling precedent: cyclists as antisocial people who refuse help even when they need it. Just strange. Is that really the message we want to send?

So actively seeking and intention are not a reliable threshold. They’re difficult to prove, and they come in so many shades that it’s a question of degree, not of yes or no.

More about "photography/philosophy"

Aristotelian logic and focal lenght

Conclusion: the heap paradox.

All these examples could be broke down, and altered to give more clarity. In Gosia’s case, would it have made a difference if she left money for the tubes? What if she clearly asked “do you have a spare tube?” Would it have been different than communicating that with the situation itself?

About the “commercially available” principle, there are at least as many ambiguities. Does it mean I can order stuff on Amazon and get it delivered somewhere along the race? After all, it’s something that every rider can do. What if I call a shop to check the opening hours, and the guys spontaneously decide to wait for me later than usual? This would be commercially available, but not to everyone – unless every rider calls ahead.

About trail angels and unsolicited help, as I said, there is a “human decency” issue; but there is also a reality issue: if we must race in complete aloneness and avoid interaction with locals, what is the purpose of crossing continents? To say it otherwise, what is the purpose of ultra races if we remove the human exploration that happen while riding in remote countries? We might as well ride ultras in Zwift, which would make it easy to enforce this aloneness rule.

I know these are provocative reflections. But it’s because bhy exploring the extremes, we can perhaps see a reasonable solution.

So far, however, I don’t see it: all cases and their variations show, on the contrary, that there are endless nuances. No threshold seems to exist.

The reason lies in vague terms such as “available to anyone” and the other formulas we encountered. Together, they define all a huge grey area rather than clear lines. In philosophy, this is the classic paradox of the heap, or sorites paradox: if you remove one grain of sand at a time from a heap, at what exact point does it stop being a heap? Is 5 grains enough to make a heap? Or maybe 6, 10, 1000? And why? We cannot know, because heap doesn’t mean anything, even though we all know what it is.

In philosophy, and therefore in ultracycling, the paradox has no solution. As Wittgenstein would put it, a vague proposition just doesn’t make sense, because it doesn’t describe anything real. And as he wrote in proposition 7 of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

Obviously, we can’t do without to race rules and leave it to the good faith of everyone.

So what’s to be done? I genuinely don’t know — that’s why I admire and respect the organizers who face these difficult calls. Sometimes they’re pretty clear – such as TBR this year – but most of the times… grey areas.

My modest solution goes back to the “media influence case”. First, various forms of support will involve all riders, provided we consider various races over time. Luck, after all, is available to anyone – even though not commercially. So, it will tend to spread democratically across the field, coherently with the concept expressed by Nelson Trees. Media crews, dotwatchers, even the riders themselves – everyone looks at riders, and can point out unusual behaviors.

Second, we can keep relying on the combination of general principles and case-by-case evaluation, much like it’s done already. This could be rather unsatisfactory, but it stems from the inevitable conclusion: the heap paradox suggests that adding rules – more specific, more stringent – would only add to the ambiguity, rather than clarifying. So, let’s stick to general principles, and apply them to the single case: this way, it’s possible to consider many other aspects that would be invisible to a blind application of rules, such as the specific situation, the good faith of the rider, the attitude afterwards, and so on.

L'articolo Unsupported races and media interference, pt2. Ethical solutions proviene da Cicloreporter - sport photography and storytelling.

Cicloreporter – sport photography and storytelling

Industry: a quick detour

Industry and transportation: a quick detour away from cycling.

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Rotterdam harbors

Freight train

Outskirts

Wind turbines

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Monviso

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Gear

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What

When and where

How

Some examples

Person and background

Why

01

02

03

04

05

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Small handbook about photography while cycletouring. #1 - Editing

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Shoot less, shoot better. But how (and - are we so sure)?

Not a digital-only issue. Contact sheet

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Person and background

Situation

Action, overlap, and alignment

01

02

03

04

Practical tip #1: put distance (of some sort)

Practical tip #2: one KM at the time

Practical tip #3: use your camera to make it smoother

Practical tip #4: think in sequences, not single shots

See you soon: some editing apps

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Turning constraints into narrative keys: Paul Fusco’s Kennedy’s Funeral Train [1968]

Turning constraints into narrative keys: Paul Fusco's Kennedy’s Funeral Train [1968].

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From constraints to consistency

Fortunate constraints

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2. Fortune favors the bold

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Third: any camera will do

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