Hannah Altman
Hannah Altman
We Will Return To You
8 x 11 Inch
hardcover
144 pages
72 plates
First Edition
Saint Lucy Books
About the Book:
Drawing from a breadth of Yiddish literature and Jewish texts, We Will Return to You considers how storytelling is translated and transformed through photographs by evoking the enigmatic, ritualistic, and multi-layered world of folklore.
From mouth to ear to pen to performance, Jewish myths evolve across the diaspora, braiding themselves into both past and future, echoing their origins and never entirely replicating. These photographs mirror this mode of continuity. The images tell tales of looming tension, cyclical repetition, unsettled environments, and open-ended truths that are punctuated by ritual and iconography. With a distinct focus on sun-soaked gestures, objects, and anxieties, the photographs sprawl across the referential and the fictitious to form a visual language that stretches and shifts across lands, generations, and the stories that give it meaning.
© Hannah Altman
Book review by Sage Helene |
In We Will Return to You, Hannah Altman’s photographs become a vessel for Jewish folklore, diasporic memory, and generational narrative. Drawing from Yiddish literature and Jewish tradition, the book unfolds not just as a collection of images, but as a contemporary act of cultural continuity. This visual mythology spans time, geography, and form. Altman doesn’t merely capture a world, she constructs one, steeped in ancestral memory and artistic devotion.
Altman reimagines what storytelling through photography can achieve. Her images do not simply depict stories; they inhabit them. Through subtle gestures and deliberate visual symbols, her photographs echo the cyclical nature of oral tradition. They shift between two intertwined modes: material and gestural. In one, she photographs objects grounded in Jewish iconography—pieces of Judaica that function as modern-day relics. For instance, in Passover Births, a pregnant woman holds a lamb, her face cast in shadow while the lamb meets the viewer’s gaze. In the Exodus narrative, the blood of the paschal lamb spared Jewish households from destruction—a visual echo of deliverance and protection.
In the gestural mode, Altman composes body-centered imagery—movements charged with reverence, unease, and transformation. In Armful, a woman’s chest is adorned with pomegranates, symbolizing fertility, righteousness, and divine abundance. The fruit, with its many seeds, also alludes to the 613 commandments of the Torah.
Passover Births, 2021 © Hannah Altman / Saint Lucy Books
Altman’s studies, such as Molting, in which a figure performs a fog-laced backbend by the water's edge, resonate more as emotional echoes than literal scenes. The spiraling form of the body illustrates the ever-shifting character of oral tradition. Here, the figure embodies recurring themes within the Jewish narrative: uncertainty, sacred tension, surrealism, and the enduring search for belonging.
Her visual narrative draws from diverse Yiddish sources, including children’s tales and interwar literature—particularly motifs of anxiety, transformation, and matriarchal strength. In A Story That Changes Depending on Who Shares It, three women stand in close proximity. The eldest, centered, gazes forward with open eyes, while the younger two close theirs, serving as a metaphor for lived wisdom and generational contrast in perception.
The photographs carry a layered sensibility. Repetition is a core device: reds reappear like blood, thread, or bruises; light transforms from blinding to diffused; certain objects and poses recur in subtly altered forms. A limited, intentional color palette with lush blacks, soft neutrals, and earthy reds, greens, and blues grounds the work. Sunlight acts as a character: at times harsh and menacing, at others filtered and tender. This balance of repetition and variation creates a rhythmic pulse that mirrors the cadence of folklore.
One Hollow to Another, 2022 © Hannah Altman / Saint Lucy Books
Altman’s images function like the folklore that inspired them: simultaneously mirror and window. As mirrors, they reflect a deeply rooted cultural lineage shaped by exile, ritual, and resilience. They hold space for inherited memory—symbols, gestures, and emotional textures passed down across generations. One striking image, also the cover photograph, embodies these themes. Altman appears in a self-portrait, a shard of mirror resting behind her teeth, casting sunlight into the camera. The mouth—traditionally a site of storytelling—now reflects light instead of speech, suggesting that narrative can be absorbed visually, mirrored rather than spoken. Altman has noted that many of her self-portraits are more character studies than personal revelations: personifications of figures embedded in collective memory.
Plagues, 2024 © Hannah Altman / Saint Lucy Books
Armful, 2024 © Hannah Altman / Saint Lucy Books
These images become tools of cultural self-recognition, inviting viewers—especially those from the Jewish diaspora—to encounter fragments of their histories refracted through time. As windows, they don’t only look backward; they also open outward and forward, into a world in flux. They call for a renewed consideration of tradition and identity, suggesting that culture is not merely preserved but continually reimagined through looking, interpreting, and remembering.
We Will Return to You doesn’t trace a linear path through history; it creates a sacred terrain—a ritual space where Jewish storytelling is constantly reborn through light, movement, and symbol. Altman’s work acts as a quiet incantation, a layered invocation that transforms myth into a living substance. More than a book of photographs, it is a living archive: honoring the past while shaping a vision of what’s still to come. In Altman’s hands, lineage becomes not a fixed inheritance, but an evolving story—retold with new eyes and enduring care.
© Hannah Altman
