Growing up in a suburban town an hour outside of Buenos Aires, photographer Maximiliano Magnano was uninitiated with the humming streets of the Argentine capital. By now, he’s walked them all. When he first moved to the big city in his twenties, it was his camera that pulled him down main avenues and back alleys, and got him to grips with the intimidating metropolis. He’d spend whole days wandering around, finding his way by getting lost, and taking “way too many” photographs. “Photography was my access to this city,” Magnano says, “It’s a way of being in contact with the world. I know that wherever I go, I’m going to take my camera and I’m going to be interested in looking and paying attention to the place, to its shapes and colors.” 

About 10 years ago, when Magnano was just starting out, he took a photo of a gas station at night. It’s not an image he’s published or that he’s used in any significant way, and looking back on it, he even regards it as a bit cliché. But it was the photograph he took when everything clicked: “I understood that I wanted to make images that people can relate to from an emotional standpoint.”