HANNAH ALTMAN

Drawing on Yiddish literature and mystic Jewish texts, this project 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.

Within the world of these images, the act of questioning transforms into an inventive ritual and the elaboration of allegories become inherited heirlooms for speculative futures. Through a photographic framework that examines how Jewish narratives are shared, inherited, and reshaped with each retelling, this project cultivates an environment that is sown from a turbulent past and reaches outward toward the rumbling world to come.