Due, one presumes, to the success of his first photo-album matching images of yesteryear with their current appearance, Macau-based photographer Gonçalo Lobo Pinheiro has returned with an encore.

The idea, once again, is “an encounter between the past and the present”; the reprised title means “What was, won’t be again”. The book is Portuguese and Chinese, but the text is minimal, it hardly matters to the English-language reader. In his introduction, he writes:

Macau has changed profoundly in recent years. Imagine photographs taken seventy or eighty years ago. And now—what can one do with them? If, on the one hand, a few scenes can still be recreated, on the other, it is impossible to find points of reference in many images, simply because those things no longer exist in the territory. Everything has changed. And so, in most cases, what once was will never be again…

And yet, he has—as before—found reflections, albeit sometimes a bit more tenuous and ghostly.

Peter Gordon is editor of the Asian Review of Books.