Hannah Altman | |
|---|---|
 Altman in 2022 | |
| Born | May 1, 1995 |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | Hunterdon Central Regional High School Point Park University (BFA) Virginia Commonwealth University (MFA) |
| Occupation | Photographer |
Hannah Altman (born May 1, 1995) is an American photographer from New Jersey. [1] [2] Her artwork explores lineage, memory, ritual, and storytelling. She is known for her use of natural light and incorporating aspects of Jewish culture into her work. [3] [4]
A graduate of Hunterdon Central Regional High School, Altman grew up in the Ringoes section of East Amwell Township, New Jersey. [5] She is Jewish of Ashkenazi descent. [3] [6] She started photographing as a child in response to her severe nearsightedness. [7] She graduated from with a BFA in photography from Point Park University in Pittsburgh, PA in 2017 and an MFA in Photography and Film from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA in 2020. [7] As of 2023, she is based in Boston, MA. [8]
Since 2015, Altman has made the project Indoor Voices, a series of portraits made with her mother. [9] [10]
In 2015, when Altman was a 19-year-old student at Point Park University, she posted the photo series And Everything Nice to her Tumblr page featuring bodily fluids replaced with glitter as a critique of female beauty standards. [11] The project garnered significant media attention, with features including Buzzfeed, [11] Huffington Post, [12] Vanity Fair, [12] and Cosmopolitan. [13] [14] She had her first solo show in 2016 at The Lantern Gallery in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which explored themes of feminism and community. [15]
In 2018, as an MFA student at Virginia Commonwealth University, she began working on Kavana, a photography project that explores Jewish memory, narrative heirlooms, and image making. [16] Kris Graves Projects published a photobook of this work in 2020, [17] which has been collected by several libraries, including the MoMa, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Harvard University. [18] [19] [20] Curator Francesca Cesari described her work in 2022 as:
"The powerful aesthetic and the profound, symbolic message her works conveys are a fresh, unexpected narrative that immediately leads to a tale of tradition and contemporary. Her poetic language tells us about the Yiddish diaspora through staged portraits, rituals and symbols that re-elaborate old experiences, deeply rooted in the past yet extremely present. There is a kind of silence that flutters through the pictures, we tend to feel the same respect we have in front of a sacred image and at the same time we recognize the tangible sensuality of bodies, with a focus on the female figures. The wonderful use of light and the simple but effective scenes reveal how the experience of exile contain both grief and resilience, a strong identity with a special code that is still relevant today." [21]
Themes of Jewish ritual and storytelling were further demonstrated with solo exhibitions at Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, Oregon in 2020, [22] Filter Photo Chicago, IL in 2021, [23] and Gallery 263 in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2022. [24] In 2023, she became the inaugural Blanksteen Artist in Residence at the Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale. [25] She was also named an Aperture Portfolio Prize finalist in 2023. [26] In March 2025, she released her second photography book We Will Return to You, published by Saint Lucy Books. [27] The book explores motifs within Jewish folklore, in particular diasporic Yiddish literature, and how those themes can be translated into photographs. [28] The book has been collected by institutions including the Getty Library, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and Princeton University Library. [29] [30] [31] Cultured Magazine included Altman on their Young Photographer's List in 2025. [32]
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