Hannah Altman, photographer:
‘We Will Return To You’ is rooted in Jewish folklore, performance, narrative, and material culture. Drawing on traditions of storytelling, it explores how memory and ritual live and expand in narratives, how symbols shift through reinterpretation, and how mysticism threads through the mundane. The work explores how stories are not only told, but embodied, reimagined, and returned to.
The photographs move between portraits and still lifes, each scene offering its own kind of narrative. In Curing, a hand sits distilled in a bag of salt water and hovering over a chair, evoking ideas of preservation, stillness, and remembrance. The project often considers how narrative lives in the body. In Telling You, I sit in the light, mouth open, as a mirror inside reflects a burst of sunlight back into the camera. The glint of light hovers at the back of the throat as a visual interruption that references oral storytelling, reflection, utterance, and revelation.
My body is both speaker and medium. I think of light as a recurring character throughout the work; it has a voice that shifts, sharpens, interrupts, and transforms. She casts long shadows, illuminates skin, and lends each image a sense of heightened presence.
Maybe, too, it’s a way to visualize the idea of the divine shifting through the mundane. In many ways, light is a form of storytelling in these photographs: it directs attention, withholds, and reveals.
Ritual objects appear throughout the project not just as symbols, but as punctuation marks that shift tone, mark transition, or reshape the flow of a visual sentence. These objects are recontextualized, often pulled from their primary use and situated within uncanny, surreal environments. I’m interested in how objects can hold narrative weight, how they act as touchstones for both memory and imagination.
The project also engages with text. The accompanying book, published by Saint Lucy Books, weaves a short story between the images. Like the photographs, the story slips between past and present, myth and memory. It reflects Jewish storytelling traditions that honor both written and oral forms, and invites a layered, open-ended experience where the photographs speak to one another, and to the viewer, in echoes.
Ultimately, We Will Return To You is about expansion and continuity. It asks how Jewish stories live on, not just through preservation, but through reinterpretation, through embodiment, through return. It explores what it means to move through time with sacred weight, and how performance, gesture, and image can carry forward the rooted narratives while remaining open-ended enough for new meanings to emerge.
‘We Will Return to You’ is available through Saint Lucy Books.
