MAP6 Photographer Barry Falk has had his long term major project In Search of Amnesia featured in the latest edition of Docu Magazine. The work featured is from a trip Barry made to the Ukraine in 2019, which was part of a larger project documenting the small Jewish communities that still exist in the Kyiv region.
The images presented are from a documentary project, which I began in 2017 and completed in May 2022. These images are portraits from Ukraine, taken in November 2019, and are part of a larger project.
In Search of Amnesia is a long-term documentary project looking into the Jewish narrative in Poland and Ukraine. The project is concerned with memory; specifically, it is concerned with how Jewish memory is held in places that suffered atrocity and immense loss. The title of this project refers to a state of trauma: amnesia refers to repressed memories, searching for amnesia is akin to the process of being inextricably drawn to this deep sense of loss whilst at the same time unable to fully revisit the site of original trauma.
The images occupy this psychological space: the push pull between the horror and the wish to rectify history. In November 2019 I returned to Ukraine, this time concentrating on the Kyiv region, formerly part of the Russian Empire and the Pale of Settlement, a region that stretched from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. This region had for centuries, despite numerous pogroms, been a haven for Judaism and the centre for European Jewish settlement. Ukraine’s cities, towns and villages once held sizeable Jewish populations active in trade, commerce and politics.
Ukraine is still culturally and religiously significant to Jews: a major pilgrimage site for Hasidic Jews. This layering of history is crucial to the understanding of Ukraine, and of Eastern Europe in general, and is the contextual soil in which this project sits. The images presented were all taken in the Kyiv region. There is talk of a Jewish revival within Ukraine, with new communities growing in the large urban areas, such as Kyiv and Odessa, however in the rural areas there is a fast declining Jewish population.
My return visit to Ukraine, planned for 24th May 2022, to travel areas east and south of L'viv, reaching down to the Carpathians, was cut short by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, flipping Europe onto its back. Many of the places I had visited, people I met, have been caught up in the ensuing war.
The work features in the May edition of Documentary Magazine, vol 3, issue 5, which is currently available to purchase: @docu.magazine