How Hannah Altman Used Jewish Folklore to Reinvent What a Photo Can Say About Memory
Welcome to this edition of [book spotlight]. Today, we uncover the layers of 'We Will Return To You,' by Hannah Altman (published by Saint Lucy Books). We'd love to read your comments below about these insights and ideas behind the artist's work.
A photograph can carry generations of memory.
This is the idea behind Hannah Altman’s book We Will Return to You. She combines Jewish folklore, ritual objects, and careful use of light to explore how personal and collective memory can live inside an image. The result is a series of photographs that feel both old and new, grounded in tradition but open to interpretation. This article looks at how she built that visual language and what other photographers can learn from it.
Altman spent years shaping this work, starting in 2018.
The project changed when she moved to a quiet town during the pandemic. There, she began blending still lifes, portraits, and Jewish stories in a new way, using photography to explore themes like inheritance, transformation, and longing. Each image carries small symbols, hands, shadows, ritual objects, that repeat and shift like parts of a prayer.
This is a photo book about how image-making can hold memory across time.
The Book
We Will Return to You is a photographic exploration of Jewish storytelling, ritual, and inherited memory by artist Hannah Altman. Published by Saint Lucy Books in 2025, the book weaves together still lifes, portraits, and recurring symbols to reflect themes of transformation, longing, and cultural continuity. Drawing from Jewish folklore and personal experience, Altman uses natural light and carefully composed imagery to reimagine how photographs can carry emotional and generational meaning. (Saint Lucy Books)
Overview of the project: What inspired you to create We Will Return to You, and how did the project evolve over time?
I worked on this book over the course of many years, and its shape changed significantly during that time. When I first began in 2018, I was thinking a lot about Judaica objects; how they function in ritual, how they live in photographs, how they carry meaning and memory. Then, when the pandemic hit in 2020, I relocated to a small beach town in Rhode Island. That move shifted something in me. The isolation and stillness created space for the work to expand. I found myself drawn to Jewish folklore, particularly Yiddish stories that blend the mundane with the mystical. I became curious about how Jewish stories are told, retold, and visually translated; how narrative, like ritual, can be embodied and reimagined. The project grew into a way to hold and reinterpret storytelling through image-making.
Interpreting Jewish folklore visually: Your work draws heavily from Yiddish literature and Jewish texts. How do you approach translating these narratives into photographic form?
I approach folklore and Jewish texts as living materials that can continuously be translated and expanded upon. Rather than illustrating stories literally, I distill recurring symbols, gestures, and motifs within the stories and let them surface in the photographs through objects, environments, and bodily performance. The narratives often explore tension, longing, memory, sacredness, and Jewish practice; these photographs are grounded in a similar framework yet remain open-ended enough to produce new, shifting meaning.
How do you decide when a visual symbol is doing “enough” to carry meaning? Is there a point when you feel an image risks becoming too opaque, or do you embrace that ambiguity?
It’s a balance. If an image feels like it requires insider knowledge just to enter the environment and draw meaning from it, then it doesn’t work for me. This is not didactic work. I often describe its accessibility by saying it’s a lush forest with many clearings, offering multiple points of entry for viewers to wander and engage. I tend to trust that a symbol is doing enough when it holds tension. It is more interesting to me when something feels charged but not fully resolved. I’m less focused on delivering a clear, on-the-nose meaning and more interested in evoking an intuitive emotional response.
Photographing ritual and iconography: The images in your book are rich with ritualistic elements and symbolism. Can you discuss how you incorporate and interpret these aspects in your photography?
Ritual is formed by repetition, transformation, and symbolism, which all translate powerfully into photographic language. I use ritual objects in the images as anchors placed throughout the series that serve as portals into memory, mysticism, and cultural inheritance. The photographs often layer Jewish iconography with invented gestures, allowing something familiar to feel newly charged or unsettled.
Balancing personal and collective memory: How do you navigate the interplay between personal experiences and collective Jewish memory in your work?
Personal and collective memory are deeply entangled. Many of the images are informed by my own experiences of Jewish learning, longing, and questioning, but they’re always in conversation with larger, intergenerational narratives. I’m interested in how inherited memory works, how we hold stories that have been handed to us, and how photography can visualise that kind of haunted inheritance.
Did you ever encounter moments while working on the book when your own memories clashed with the collective ones? How do you navigate those contradictions visually?
Yes and no. I see myself as a link on a long chain, and all experiences are interconnected. But I definitely have a particular approach to Jewish practice and storytelling that feels at times maybe out of step with the dominant approach. Rather than trying to resolve those contradictions, I let them shape the work. Some images lean into discomfort or disorientation to make space for multiple truths to coexist. Visually, that might mean layering gestures or placing traditional objects in unfamiliar environments, allowing the tension between personal and collective memory to surface naturally.
Advice for photographers exploring cultural narratives: What advice would you give to photographers who wish to delve into their cultural or religious heritage through their art?
I don’t think I can really speak for anyone other than myself and my own process, but I found that my work is much more honest when I follow the directions I am attracted to without trying to make some grand monolithic statement. Spending time with materials (texts, objects, rituals) that resonate with me and seeing how I can tease them out in my work. Living with them for a while. Using the same material in multiple photographs. Letting my questions and contradictions guide the images. I think it’s more interesting both for the making and viewer not to represent everything with perfect clarity. Ambiguity is often a form of honesty to me.
Use of natural light as a storytelling tool: Your photographs often utilise natural light to create mood and meaning. How do you use light to enhance the narratives within your images?
Natural light is a recurring character in the work. Its presence shapes the environment and emotional undercurrent of the images. I think of light as a narrative force that helps build the world of the project. I’m especially drawn to sharp, directional sunlight that cuts across a room or lands heavily on a body. It creates a sense of drama and performance, almost like the light itself is trying to speak through the environment. In many ways, that kind of light mirrors the themes I’m exploring: moments of haunting, tension, transformation. It helps situate the images in a world that is heightened, symbolic, and slightly out of time. The light helps it feel like something adjacent to the everyday but clearly touched by ritual and myth.
Incorporating still life and portraiture: Your book features both still life compositions and portraits. How do these different genres contribute to the overall storytelling in your work?
To me, portraits feel loud and still lifes feel quiet. I can’t explain that further other than pure feeling. Still lifes interjected between portraits throughout the book sequence act as quiet interludes. They are moments of slow performance, residue, time passing. The portraits, on the other hand, bring the body into dialogue with narrative, embodying motifs within Jewish folklore in a very gestural way. Together, I think they create a sort of rhythm that mirrors that kind of push and pull flow of Jewish storytelling.
Do you sequence your images intentionally to mimic a liturgical or narrative rhythm? How does the editing and ordering of images in the book mirror the kinds of storytelling you reference in Jewish tradition?
Yes, exactly. The sequencing has a deliberate motion between loud and quiet. I wanted the book to feel like it had its own pulse, with some of the more open landscapes and the still lifes offering moments to pause or exhale between the more emotionally charged portraits. It also has a lot of repeating symbols and gestures that appear throughout, like hands, shadows, water, and portraits from the shoulders up to the head. The order of the images creates visual repetitions, returns, moments of shifting, which mirrors the layered, circular way Jewish stories are often told. It’s less about linear progression and more about building meaning through accumulation and return.
Exploring themes of transformation and continuity: Themes of transformation and continuity are prevalent in your book. How do you visually represent these concepts in your photography?
Transformation and continuity are themes as old as Judaism itself. It is woven into its rituals, its stories, its cycles of time. In my photographs, transformation is an almost surreal, in-between site: a gesture in motion, an object in a new context. These moments suggest that something is shifting, even if we don’t yet know what it will become. Continuity, on the other hand, appears through repetition. I include recurring symbols, poses, and motifs that echo across the series like a kind of visual liturgy. I’m interested in how photography can hold both states at once: the ephemeral and the enduring, the old and the new, the broken and the reassembled. This ongoing tension and expansion is very Jewish and central to the work.
Impact of exhibiting the work publicly: What has been the response to exhibiting We Will Return to You, and how does sharing this work with an audience influence your perspective on it?
The work has been out in the world for a few months now, and the response has been really moving. I’ve been struck by how many people have found points of emotional connection within the photographs. While the project is deeply rooted in Jewish visual language and storytelling, I think it also speaks to more universal themes: longing, tension, sacredness, inheritance. People tell me that the images feel familiar even if they don’t recognise the specific references, which is what I hoped would happen: that the photographs offer both an entry point and a provocation. There’s something powerful in creating an open-ended narrative for people to walk into and explore, and occasionally see their own searching reflected back at them.
To discover more about this intriguing body of work and how you can acquire your own copy, you can find and purchase the book here. (Saint Lucy Books)
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