Jewish thought suggests that the memory of an action is as primary as the action itself. This is to say that when my hand is wounded, I remember other hands. I trace ache back to other aches - when my mother grabbed my wrist too hard pulling me across the intersection, when my great-grandmother’s fingers went numb on the ship headed towards Cuba fleeing the Nazis, when Miriam’s palms enduringly poured water for the Hebrews throughout their desert journey - this is how the Jew is able to fathom an ache. Because no physical space is a constant for the Jewish diaspora, time and the rituals that steep into it are centered as a mode of carrying on. The bloodline of a folktale, a tradition, a song, pulses through interpretation and enactment. Treating photographs in ​Kavana​ as such, I explore notions of Jewish memory, narrative heirlooms, and interpretive image making; ​the works are positioning themselves in the past as memories, in the present as stories being told, and in the future as rituals to interpret and repeat.​ To encounter an image in this way is not only to ask what it feels like, but to ask: what does it remember like?

Hannah Altman is a Jewish-American artist from New Jersey. Her work interprets relationships between gestures, the body, interiority, and lineage, exploring the structures that perpetuate them using photographic based media. She has recently exhibited with the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Blue Sky Gallery, the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, and Junior High Gallery. Her work has been published in the Carnegie Museum of Art Storyboard, Vanity Fair, Huffington Post, and British Journal of Photography, among others. She has delivered lectures on her work and research across the country, including Yale University and the Society for Photographic Education National Conference. She is the 2019 recipient of the Bertha Anolic Israel Travel Award and 2020 MFA graduate at Virginia Commonwealth University.

You can see more of Hannah’s work on her site: www.hannahaltmanphoto.com

And follow along on her Instagram: @hannah.altman