For more than a decade, Lorenzo Tugnoli photographed Afghanistan. The pictures in It Can Never Be The Same come from the final stretch of that work, made between 2019 and 2023 as the United States and the Taliban negotiated and the Afghan Republic came apart. Yet the book, published by GOST Books in 2025, is not a chronicle of events. It gathers seventy-nine images into something quieter and more unsettled: a reflective sequence that asks what photographs can and cannot say about a country they approach from outside.
Tugnoli worked on the book with the researcher Francesca Recchia, combing through his archive for images that told a different story from the one that appeared in the news. The result resists the shape of conventional reportage. Black-and-white photographs move between sweeping aerial views and details of daily life; grenades and guns sit alongside domestic interiors. The monochrome makes the pictures hard to place in time and, by extension, questions the authority that photojournalism has long claimed for itself. Aerial views evoke the distant perspective of foreign militaries; ground-level scenes refuse that distance. The captions are held back until the end, so that the viewer meets the book as a world of fragments first, and only later learns what some of them show.
Two writers extend the book’s argument without dissolving the photographs into illustration. The journalist and writer Habib Zahori contributes a text on ordinary family life in Afghanistan, shifting attention away from the large movements of war. Francesca Recchia, an author and researcher, closes the volume with an essay. Together they keep the book’s central question open: how does the telling of a story shape what its audience can see?
For a collector, the appeal lies in the deliberation rather than the subject alone. Tugnoli is not assembling a greatest-hits file from a long assignment; he is using the book to interrogate his own position within the machinery of representation. The collaboration with Recchia, the suppression of captions, the refusal of a clean narrative are structural decisions, not decoration. In a field crowded with war photography, It Can Never Be The Same earns attention by making its own doubts the compositional principle.
