Hannah Altman

As It Were, Suspended in Midair

February 13 - June 12, 2025 

photograph of a woman's face with closed eyes and blood-red tears running down face.

Hannah Altman, Plagues, 2024, Archival pigment print, 24 x 30 inches

A woman in a sunny forest leaning forward with arms outstretched behind her

Hiding (Flying), 2023, Archival pigment print, 25 x 20 inches

In As It Were, Suspended in Midair, Hannah Altman’s photographs examine how Jewish myths are shared, inherited, and reshaped across the diaspora. Altman draws from Yiddish literature and Jewish mystical texts as she situates her female protagonists in lush landscapes and fraught interiors. Animated by sunlight, their postures, gestures, environments, and ritual objects foreshadow abundance and danger. Their mere presence threatens dominant narratives grounded in patriarchal tradition. 

Still lifes interject like incantations, offering suspense and new possibilities: a corner knee-deep in salt, a hand mirror submerged in a jar, an open-palmed Baba Yaga puppet – a witch from Slavic folklore who feasted on children. Altman juxtaposes a person’s back with five thick nails puncturing their white garment and a stretched klaf – parchment paper produced from a tanned and kosherized animal inscribed with biblical passages to fit inside a mezuzah. Layering symbols and allusions, Altman builds a world that recasts and transforms Jewish ritual and folklore toward the world ahead.

“As It Were, Suspended in Midair” Explores the Visuals of a Lineage, Joetta Maue, Issue 14: June 3, 2025, Boston Art Review

THE TICKET Things to do around Boston this weekend and beyond, February 12, 2025, Boston Globe

"As It Were, Suspended In Midair  emerges as a dynamic, speculative reworking of tradition, resonating across generations and landscapes". —Kaitlyn Ovett Clark, January 2025, Boston Art Review

What Will You Remember? By Suzanne Révy

HANNAH ALTMAN is a Jewish-American artist from New Jersey and based in Boston. She holds an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her photographs portray lineage, folklore, memory, and narrative. 

Her work has been exhibited at Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Silver Eye Center for Photography, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Filter Photo, Technical Collections Dresden Museum, Blue Sky Gallery, Candela Gallery, and the Griffin Museum of Photography, among others. Publications where her work has appeared includes the New York Times, Artforum, Vanity Fair, PHMuseum, Carnegie Museum of Art Storyboard, Lensculture, Booooooom, and British Journal of Photography. She was included in the 2021 Silver List, a 2022 Hopper Prize finalist, the 2022 Portraits Hellerau Photography Award First Prize Winner, a 2023 Innovate Grant Recipient, and a 2023 Aperture Portfolio Prize Finalist. She became the inaugural Blanksteen Artist in Residence at the Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale in 2022.

Her first photobook Kavana (2020, Kris Graves Projects) is housed in permanent collections including the MoMa Library and the Metropolitan Museum of Art Thomas J Watson Library. Her new monograph, We Will Return to You (2025) is published by Saint Lucy Books.

A women with a yad pointing up into her raised neck

Hannah Altman, Yad,  2023, Archival pigment print, 20 x 25 inches

Project Statement

Rooted in the depths of Yiddish literature and 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. The photographs tell tales of cycles, looming tension, unsettled environments, and open-ended truths punctuated by ritual and iconography. With a distinct focus on sun-soaked gestures, objects, and anxieties, the photographs sprawl between 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. 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 sown from a turbulent past and reaches outward toward the rumbling world to come.

-Hannah Altman

Events

two art exhibitions
Cross-Campus Tour: Kniznick Gallery - Rose Art Museum

March 6, 2025

This was an inspiring afternoon of art and exploration across Brandeis University. We began our journey at the Kniznick Gallery with an artist-guided tour of Hannah Altman’s As It Were, Suspended in Midair. Drawing from Yiddish literature and Jewish mystical texts, Altman situates her female protagonists in lush landscapes and fraught interiors where sunlit gestures and ritual objects foreshadow abundance and danger. Her evocative photographs recast and transform Jewish folklore toward the world ahead.

From there, we walked together to the Rose Art Museum to experience the complex and visionary work of Leonora Carrington (1917–2011). Leonora Carrington: Dream Weaver, the artist’s first-ever museum exhibition in New England, brings together over 30 works of art, some rarely seen, that span over six decades of Carrington’s prolific art-making career. Carrington’s compositions and imagery—inspired by biography, folklore, mysticism, religions, myths, and the occult—take us on multidimensional journeys that seek to unravel the world’s most profound mysteries.
Hannah Altman on left, Mark Alice Durant on right

(L-R) Hannah Altman, Mark Alice Durant

Hannah Altman, "As It Were, Suspended in Midair", Artist Talk and Book Launch

March 20, 2025

This artist talk and book launch celebrated Hannah Altman's solo exhibition in the Kniznick Gallery, As It Were, Suspended in Midair, and the March 2025 release of her book, We Will Return to You (Saint Lucy Books). Altman was joined in conversation by photographer and scholar Mark Alice Durant, publisher and editor of Saint Lucy Books. 

watch here

Hannah Altman (l), Miriam Anzovin (r)

(L-R) Hannah Altman, Miriam Anzovin

Through Multiple Lenses, A Passover Inspired Art Conversation: Reimagining Hidden Narratives with Photographer Hannah Altman and Storyteller Miriam Anzovin

March 31, 2025

Moderated by Maia Lefferman, Brandeis ‘25

In the spirit of Passover and the contemporary retelling of Jewish stories, photographer Hannah Altman joined online storytelling sensation Miriam Anzovin in conversation to share their processes of harnessing the power of narrative using their unique voices. Anzovin used Altman's photographs as Jewish “text” to encounter and guided us on a tour of some images in Hannah Altman's As It Were, Suspended in Midair, highlighting lesser known female stories she found within.

Cosponsored by Brandeis Hillel, JFAB: Jewish Feminist Association of Brandeis, Combined Jewish Philanthropies, and the Jewish Arts Collaborative.

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