Nature Photography

Cycling’s Best Week Is Here

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Associated Press' photographer, Laurent Cipriani, shifts the focus from cyclists of Tour de France to bystanders in his series titled 'Along the Road'

Associated Press’ photographer, Laurent Cipriani, shifts the focus from cyclists of Tour de France to bystanders in his series titled ‘Along the Road’

Welcome to the best three weeks in professional cycling. The Tour de France is the world’s most popular and grueling cycling race. It is a 23-day journey throughout France — and occasionally other European countries — comprising 21 stages, and the route is different every year. The first edition of the Tour was in 1903. The 2015 edition of the Tour will run July 4-26, beginning in Utrecht, Netherlands and ending on the Champs-Élysées in Paris.

If photographing the Tour de France doesn’t sound difficult enough, imagine doing it while riding on the back of a motorbike travelling up to 60 miles per hour. Laurent Cipriani has been doing that for the Associated Press since 2011, part of a team of photographers, editors, and drivers—what he refers to as “a travelling theater.” While Cipriani’s focus is on the cyclists, what initially made an impression on him was the amount of people lined up along the streets watching the race.

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A Picture Perfect World

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PHOTO: Raghu Rai

PHOTO: Raghu Rai

When is the last time you saw someone sans a camera? No device in their hands and none dangling around their necks? Well, “we can’t seem to recollect” is our answer, too. And, may be there are reasons for it. More than the power to immortalize fragments of time, a photograph brings together all the pictures you’ve seen, the books you’ve read, the music you’e heard, the people you’ve loved. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt, say others. And ace Indian photographer, Raghu Rai, protégé of Henri Cartier-Bresson, pens his own take in Nat Geo Traveler.

I am called a photographer, and my dharma is photography but I think of myself as an explorer. To me, the best way to explore life is through photography. Life changes constantly, so the more you explore the more you are enriched.

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