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On a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Georges Didi-Huberman tears three pieces of bark from birch trees on the edge of the site. Looking at these pieces after his return home, he sees them as letters, a flood, a path, time, memory, flesh. The bark serves as a springboard to Didi-Huberman´s meditations on his visit, recorded in this spare, poetic, and powerful book. Bark is a personal account, drawing not on the theoretical apparatus of scholarship but on Didi-Huberman´s own history, memory, and knowledge. The text proceeds as a series of reflections, accompanied by Didi-Huberman´s photographs of the visit. The photographs are not meant to be art - Didi-Huberman confesses that he "photographed practically everything without looking" - but approach it nevertheless.

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Georges Didi-Huberman, a philosopher and art historian based in Paris, teaches at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Recipient of the 2015 Adorno Prize, he is the author of more than forty books on the history and theory of images, including Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière (MIT Press) and Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, about the Sonderkommando photographs.

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