ARTIST STATEMENT
Drawing largely on Yiddish literature, We Will Return to You considers how storytelling is translated andtransformed through photographs by evoking the enigmatic, ritualistic, and layered world of Jewish folklore. Moving from mouth to ear to pen to performance, these myths shift across generations and throughout the diaspora, carrying traces of their origins while continually changing form. The photographs in this project mirror this mode of continuity, treating the photographic image as a site of retelling and transformation. Centering shtetl-era folklore, ritual objects, bodily gesture, and collaborative performance, the work constructs scenes that exist between historical memory and speculative fiction. The images tell tales of tension, mysticism, cycles, and unsettled environments punctuated by ritual and iconography.
Exploring how Jewish myth-making is inherited and reshaped through each retelling, this project builds a visual language rooted in embodiment and collective memory. The photographs plant an environment sown from a turbulent past that grows outward toward imagined futures, asking how cultural narratives expand through continual retranslation.
ARTIST BIO
Hannah Altman is a Jewish-American photographer whose work considers myth, performance, memory, and lineage. She holds an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and is based in Somerville, MA. Her prints and photobooks Kavana (Kris Graves Projects, 2020) and We Will Return to You (Saint Lucy Books, 2025) are held in collections including the Museum of Modern Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Getty Center, Cleveland Museum of Art, Harvard University, Princeton University, Stanford University, and the Yale
Slifka Center, where she was the 2022-2023 Blanksteen Artist in Residence. Altman’s work has been exhibited worldwide at institutions including the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, MK&G Hamburg, Houston Center for Photography, Koffler Arts, Candela Photographic Arts, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Brandeis Kniznick Gallery, and Silver Eye Center for Photography. Her photographs have been published in The New York Times, Artforum, Vanity Fair, Harper’s Magazine, LensCulture, and British Journal of Photography, among others. She was a finalist for the 2022 Hopper Prize and 2023 Aperture Portfolio Prize, received the 2022 Portraits Hellerau Photography Award First Prize and a 2023 Innovate Grant, was a 2025 Arnold Newman Prize honorable mention, and was nominated for the 2025 Cultured Magazine Young Photographers List.