Barry Falk: In Search of Amnesia

In 2017 Barry Falk flew to Krakow to trace his family history. This was the beginning of a five-year photographic project seeking to understand the Jewish narrative in Eastern Europe. His photographs focus on the question of how Jewish memory is preserved in places that suffered collective loss and where terrible atrocities were committed during the Holocaust. The title In Search of Amnesia describes the conflict between the desire to suppress painful memories of traumatic events and the yearning to consciously preserve these memories. With great care, but also with a keen curiosity, he visits the places that were once rich in Jewish culture and talks to the custodians of Jewish memory: the historians, local photographers, archivists, archaeologists and tour guides, to reveals what both remains and is absent.