HANNAH ALTMAN

Excerpts from the monograph We Will Return to You (2025, Saint Lucy Books).

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.