A photographer picks up a camera. He holds his whole world in his hands: his memories, his references and his dreams. It is as if his camera were some sort of safe conduct pass to allow him into worlds that are not his own, a battering ram that breaks through the walls of forbidden cities.

I wanted to write a book about a photographer who travels the world to photograph the cities that had been in his dreams since he was a child. Magnificent cities whose names evoked adventure and mystery. Places that, in his imagination, transformed into labyrinths whose walls were covered in images: London, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, Mexico City, Rome, New York and finally, unexpectedly, his hometown, São Paulo, which, because of a pandemic and the isolation, took on an air of distance, becoming foreign and, as such, possible for him to visit in memory.

But, suddenly, the photographer, who was not a writer, looked around and found that they had been visited long ago. Only they had not been photographed as he had dreamed them. He saw then that his Leica was his only companion and accomplice on this new, but ancient, journey.

This book is about the inner solitude of adventure – it’s about a quest and an escape. Finding is easier than fleeing, but the flight is what makes us keep searching.