The Last Folio Series (8)

Private Collection, California

Yuri Dojc is a Toronto-based contemporary Slovak-Canadian photographer. The Last Folio was a photography project spanning from 1997 to 2015 that preserved the cultural memory of the Holocaust in Slovakia. The project began following a chance encounter at Dojc's father's funeral, when a family friend who had survived the holocaust, needed a lift from the funeral. During their car ride conversations, Dojc became intrigued by the history of the Holocaust in Slovakia. With the help of the family friend, Dojc invited veterans from the community to be photographed, thus starting the collection of portraits for The Last Folio. As the project expanded, growing in photographs and involvement from the Slovak community, it gained sponsorship from the Slovak government. In 2005, when Dojc met Katya Krausova, a Slovak producer and filmmaker, they formed a partnership and produced a 20-minute documentary about the project, filmed in the small town of Bardejov. A year later, word of the project travelled, reaching a man who was a caretaker of an abandoned school in Slovakia. He urged Dojc to visit the space and explore its preserved history. There, he discovered the petrified religious books left behind by the students before World War II. Dojc documented these artefacts, as seen in this series of eight intricate colour photographs, which widened the scope of the expansive project even further to include a preservation of not only personal but cultural history as well.