In 2017, Barry Falk flew to Krakow to look into his own family history. The trip did not end there. It became the beginning of a five-year photographic project, and the book that came out of it, published by Kehrer Verlag, treats genealogy only as a doorway. What holds Falk’s attention is the larger question of how Jewish history in Eastern Europe is remembered at all.

His subject is memory in the places where the worst of it happened. Working in Poland and Ukraine, he photographs sites where Jews were murdered, records objects kept in museums, and seeks out the people who guard what survives — historians, forensic archaeologists, artists. The title names the tension he keeps returning to: the wish to put painful memories away, set against the wish to hold on to them deliberately. Amnesia here is not simple forgetting. It is something pursued, resisted, and negotiated in the landscape itself.

The method is careful rather than dramatic. Falk approaches these places with a curiosity that stays respectful, letting absence carry weight alongside what remains — a building, a display case, a stone. Because the project unfolded over years instead of a single reporting trip, the photographs accumulate into a portrait of a region where traces are uneven and the work of memory is ongoing.

Kehrer Verlag, a house long attentive to photography of this kind, gives the work a considered hardcover form of roughly 216 pages, and the sequencing does as much as any single frame to carry the argument. Falk is a UK-based photographer, and the project is his throughout.

For a collector, the case rests on substance rather than scarcity. This is one photographer’s sustained inquiry into Holocaust memory in Poland and Ukraine, made over five years, with the coherence — subject, fieldwork, order, design — that comes from a single question followed to its end.