Italian photographer Riccardo Magherini traced the development of a body of work spanning more than 15 years and six major urban series - Tokyo, Firenze, Circus, Hongkok (HKK), Bangkok (BKK), and Hanoi – at an engaging talk on the penultimate day of Xposure 2026.

Each series is a distinct chapter in an evolving approach to image-making that treats photography not as a single captured moment, but as something reconstructed from memory and perception.

Florence-based and represented by galleries in Paris, London, and New York, Magherini has received recognition from the International Photography Awards and Prix de la Photographie Paris for his layered, composite photographs - images in which multiple frames from the same location are superimposed to create a single picture that holds several moments at once.

His photos have a painterly quality, capturing street scenes in an abstract style. Many of them capture movement and time to create a dynamic effect.“The idea is not to freeze time,” he told the audience. “but to build it slowly, through the brain, the way I remember it.”

Describing Tokyo which Magherini began recording in 2011 after his first visit to Japan – as giving a sharp sense of estrangement, he channelled the feeling into a creative force.

“I started to take pictures all around, to collect. And then I organised them back in the studio, editing thousands of images.” The result was a method of superimposing different moments onto a single viewpoint, with the crowd functioning as a layered presence and individual faces emerging from within it. It was, Magherini noted, an accidental discovery that became the foundation for everything that followed.

Magherini then moved to the Firenze series, developed when travel was not possible and he was forced to work in his home city. He anchored the project in the city's Renaissance architecture, using central perspective and 19th-century painting as visual references.

The Circus series represented a further shift. Magherini made a deliberate decision to abandon the fixed single point of view that had anchored his previous two series. “Allowing myself to abandon the fixed point of view, I treated the background of the circus as a canvas, taking the freedom to reconstruct reality using elements from different moments, different scenes, different parts of the arena, and layering them with childhood memories.”

This was the point at which the photographer’s method moved from documentary reconstruction to something closer to imaginative composition.

Hong Kong marked another turning point. For the first time, Magherini incorporated the physical infrastructure of the city; the pipes, cables, and passageways that make up the urban fabric - as a deliberate visual element rather than background.

Bangkok pushed the work further still, with Magherini making portraits a conscious choice rather than something that emerged organically from the crowd. He shot close, using a 21mm lens at waist level, and noted that many of his subjects were aware of being photographed. “I wanted specifically to speak about people and what I perceive them to be in that precise moment. In a way, I was able to view what to achieve with the images later in post-production.”

The Hanoi series, which demanded a quieter register than any of the previous work, was described by Magherini as full of “organic matter that reflects in position and colour. Vietnam’s generational memory, particularly of war, is present in the texture of the city and in the divide between younger and older residents, a tension that shaped the series without being directly depicted.”

Magherini closed by reflecting on the project as a whole: 15 years of working across radically different environments, each of which forced a change in his method.