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Past and Present

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Photojournalist Gonçalo Lobo Pinheiro, who has been living in Macau for more than 12 years, recently unveiled his latest photographic documentary project What once was will never be again…  at the Rui Cunha Foundation gallery. The project is the result of more than a year’s work, now published as a book and a photographic exhibition.
 
For a little over a year, the author sought to acquire or borrow old photographs of Macau, captured in black and white, between 1930 and 1990, in various formats.  He then attempted to find the original locations of the old photos and superimpose them over their contemporary sites.  The end result is a striking portrayal of just how much the city has transformed over the decades. 
 
“My intention is to show the changes through a different narrative, placing old photos in new places. This book and exhibition represent a meeting between the past and the present,” explains Gonçalo. “I collected old images of the territory, aquiring them at auctions, on the Internet, from private individuals, in shops and even in Portugal.  A few of them were given to me or lent to me.”
 
The initial stage of finding all the old photos turned out to be harder than he originally expected. 
 
 “I ended up making several appeals on social networks to have old images of Macau in my possession, but this did not happen. People welcomed the initiative, but hardly anyone provided me with images,” he comments. “I could have easily solved the problem by just using prints or photocopies, but that was not the idea. I wanted to have the original photographs and this, perhaps, made the project more complicated to carry out.”
 
Gonçalo initially planned to include at least 100 photographs in the book and around 30 in the exhibition, but this target proved to be a little too ambitious. Ultimately, he managed to collect around 100 images, but, of those, only chose to edit and publish 40, exhibiting 20. The rest were either duplicates or impossible to be recreated today in the 21st century, as the city has changed so dramatically.
 
“Imagine photographs taken 70 or 80 years ago. And now, what to do with them? If, on the one hand, it is still possible to recreate some scenarios, on the other hand, it may be impossible to get points of reference in other photographs, because things simply no longer exist in the territory. Everything has changed. Therefore, in the great majority of cases, what was, will never be again”.
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