Photographer Hannah Altman Plumbs the Tension at the Core of Jewish Myth-Making With Stirring Images

NOMINATED BY GILLIAN LAUB
30—BOSTON

This has been a big year for Hannah Altman, whose keen explorations of Jewish culture are the subject of a monograph, We Will Return to You, and shows in Toronto, Richmond, Hamburg, and at Brandeis University’s Kniznick Gallery in Waltham, Massachusetts.

“In Jewish tales, there is an ongoing tension with loss, change, persecution, and uncertainty, threaded through mysticism and memory. My work leans into that way of seeing. The images reward a slow, intentional viewer who approaches the photographs with both curiosity for the unknown and their own projections and connections. Ideally, it opens up questions about what we inherit and how we continuously reimagine it. I’m thinking about how rituals, narratives, and objects evolve over time, and how gesture expands translation. I guess there’s something hopeful in the idea that we can keep reshaping what we’ve inherited instead of letting it calcify or disappear—a refusal to be flattened. Making work is part of that for me. It’s a way of insisting that storytelling deeply matters, and that narratives can keep growing and shifting as long as we keep returning to them.”

Hannah Altman, Yad (You).

Hannah Altman, Curing.