One unplanned day in Nice, an unfamiliar camera, and the accidental birth of a gaze that would keep searching the world for years.

Some places are famous for something. A church, a monument, a beach beautiful enough to be ruined by thousands of people who came all that way to photograph it. Then there are places with nothing to show, no attraction to review, and no particular reason to visit. This is one of them...

Old racing cars, the Mille Miglia, and an age when machines were built to live, run, scar, and outlast the people who made them.

Four photographs taken many years ago. Two young women, a little light, and the kind of closeness that needs no direction because it already knows its part. What I remember most is how real their smiles were—not offered to the camera, but born from the simple presence of one another.

There is a moment I have always loved more than any destination: the suspended instant when you take your seat, rest the camera on your knees, look through the window, and realize that for the next few hours you have surrendered control.

Sometimes I look at my cat and think he has understood everything. He rolls across the living-room rug as though it were the most important mission in the universe, demands affection as his birthright, and then sleeps without guilt or anxiety.

At some point in life, you are young enough to believe the future must have a plan. Then you grow up and discover that the future, in most cases, is only a long series of improvisations performed by people desperately trying to hide from everyone else that they have no fucking idea what they are doing. These photographs come from before. Before photography became work, archives, deliveries, selections, post-production, and all those very adult things that manage, with remarkable efficiency, to work their way even into what you love. Back then, I had just discovered a camera. I was a boy with plenty of questions and very few answers.

An embrace between a mother and daughter outlives every detail of the forgotten place and becomes an intimate photograph about protection, home, and what truly remains.

Raindrops race down the window, and from in here they almost seem to be competing to reach somewhere first—a little like he feels, if I am honest.

Before I knew what I was doing. These are not my best photographs. The focus wanders, the colors have the washed-out look of the compact camera I owned back then, and in at least three frames you can see my thumb in the corner because I had not yet learned where to put my hands...