Hadassah-Brandeis Institute

Hannah Altman

As It Were, Suspended in Midair

February 13 - June 12, 2025 

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.

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