Reimagining Tradition in Hannah Altman’s Photography
Hannah Altman
Visual media has the often-underappreciated power to preserve the past, reveal new insights about the present, and create worlds of the future. Visual representations of Jewish culture that permeate contemporary and popular media have historically focused on well known Jewish rituals, the Holocaust, or traditional Jewish iconography. These are valuable pieces of Jewish experience, and yet, long muted by assimilation, Jewish artwork now begs for an infusion of nuance and expansiveness to energize depictions of Jewish culture.
Photographer Hannah Altman seeks to expand our collective imagination of Jewish experience, reaching into the past to inspire a future ahead. Through her images, Altman dives headfirst into Jewish themes, drawing from and reinvigorating a rich history of Jewish folklore in order to envision new Jewish futures. Her work intermingles light and dark, nature and violence. Altman’s art asks more questions than it answers, in the process rejecting the legibility and materiality that white, capitalist, Christian culture demands. Contemporary American Jewry, to me, often feels limited to a version of Jewish history solely constructed of persecution. While this certainly is a substantial and formative component of Jewish identity, feeling out the nooks and crannies of Jewish culture buried beneath the surface has always connected me more deeply to Judaism. Altman’s ability to uncover this deep cultural lore makes her work feel refreshing and entirely captivating.
Yad (You) by Altman
Altman’s work has been exhibited internationally, been published by the New York Times and Vanity Fair, and is housed in the MoMa Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art Thomas J Watson Library. Altman’s show, We Will Return to You, is now on view at Abakus Projects in Boston, so I was delighted to sit down and discuss this current body of work with her.
Emma Breitman: Thanks, so much for meeting with me. Your work explores Jewish visual culture in a subtle way that, without leaning on prominent Jewish iconography, still puts itself in conversation with Jewish thought and themes. How did you come to create Jewish photography in this way?
Hannah Altman: I’ve been making work around Jewish narrative and photography for several years now. Early in the process I often found myself photographing what one might consider more “visibly Jewish” objects and rituals—things one can point to within a photograph and say, “that right there is the concrete Jewish reference.” Over time, I found myself growing more interested in exploring the invisible structures of Jewish folklore and how those modes of written storytelling might translate into photographs. I’m interested in exploring how Jews tell stories, what role objects play in these tales, and how we transfer our world through cycles of narratives.
EB: I really like your phrasing of “visible” versus “invisible” structures of Jewish folklore. For me, that is exactly how your work subverts normative standards of legibility. Does this resonate with you and your artistic process at all?
HA: I think there is a temptation to over explain cultural identity markers when making work that will be seen by an audience who may not be familiar with the source. Many of my first explorations bridging Judaica and photography were quite literal and dioramic of the photographed object’s purpose, but this can become heavy handed and tiresome as both a viewer and a maker. There is a reasonable desire to shape a neat and digestible reference point in order to feel seen and understood. But an ethnographic approach can flatten a photograph and oversimplify Jewish practice. As I have moved more into a space of making informed by Jewish narrative, the work feels more open and conversational. If legibility demands concrete truths, the slippage between visible and invisible Jewish influence within the photographs resists this by questioning what is read as a “Jewish image.” The photographs use Jewish folkloric tools (repetition, metaphor, liminality, the infusion of real customs into fictional tales) to build a visual world that is both rooted in our past and creates something new to engage with.
EB: This new body of work is so gorgeous in the way you balance violence and beauty, in a way making the violence beautiful. Can you say a bit about this underlying tone and how it relates to the Jewish folklore you’ve explored?
HA: As the pandemic unfolded in 2020, I was reading a lot of Yiddish children’s story anthologies and feeling drawn to the dark underbelly of a lot of the narratives. The words were simple, but the undertones of persecution and perseverance were not diluted. I was drawn to this direct yet open use of textual language, and interested in how that might read through visual language. Finding so many stories across time and space and authorship that describe violence through a sort of slow build, an element out of character’s control, a shift in environment, a constant anxiety—these moments become the base for photographs to be made as they expand into stories of their own. I use a certain framing of sunlight to build a visual world around the photographs that might look beautiful and buoyant at first glance, but ultimately feels immersed and uneasy.
Curing by Altman
Tale in Its Mouth (Clapping) by Altman
EB: That’s beautiful. I want to call specific attention to two photos in We Will Return to You, Curing, showing a hand immersed in a bag of water, and Its Tale in Its Mouth (Clapping), an image of dead fish head with two hands forming its tail. To me these two images feel connected. They tell an interesting story about the violence and life cycle of this fish—the hand/fish in the water feels suffocated, though “living” in the water, all the while surrounded by the artificial environment of a house. Meanwhile the fish out of water is dead, though somehow more alive and surrounded by a lush, green, natural environment. Do you see these two images in conversation with one another? How do you see Jewish folklore playing a role in this story?
HA: Many of the works from this project are in conversation with each other in varying ways, and these two are good examples of how different images can live in the same photographic world that is underpinned by Jewish thought. Its Tale in Its Mouth (Clapping) shows a pair of hands mid-clap and making a tail shape, hovering over the head of a fish. I had been thinking about the fish head presented on Rosh Hashanah suggesting we “be the head” in the new year, and that thought is the base of the photograph as I allow the narrative to expand. The hands clapping above the fish evoke a sort of slapping sound between the palms - a sound remarkably close to a fish floundering on land. In this way the fish is very out of its element, but the memory of the sound it makes is continued by human engagement and performance. This subversion of where things should be within an environment also exists in Curing. The photograph shows a hand suspended in a bag of water, stagnant over an empty chair. In this sense the water is a sort of brine, both preserving the hand and limiting its movement. It plays into a folkloric emphasis on keeping and continuing peoplehood, and together they both ask: how do we preserve things? Through stillness or with movement?
Altman’s show We Will Return to You addresses the questions that the Jewish community has been grappling with for as long as we have existed. The work sinks its teeth into the meat of core, existential questions, leaving the viewer to catch the drippings and create new meanings of what Jewish existence can look like. Altman’s work, much like Jewish practice, grows outward and expands upon contact with its audience, ultimately becoming a blossoming extension of Jewish ritual itself. We Will Return to You is on view at Abakus Projects in Boston from October 6-29.
