A Look at Womanhood through an Intimate Collaboration

With a nod to Jewish folkloric structures and matrilineal gender performance, Hannah Altman teams up with her mother to produce a collection of familial self-portraits that aim to enhance the conversation surrounding female self-representation.

With a nod to Jewish folkloric structures and matrilineal gender performance, Hannah Altman teams up with her mother to produce a collection of familial self-portraits that aim to enhance the conversation surrounding female self-representation.

By engaging with imagery over the last five years, my mother and I have been building Indoor Voices around inter-generational womanhood, matrilineal responsibility, and the symbolism in quiet intimacy. The work is a collaborative discourse of familial and female-oriented complexities that makes a testimony to our lineage and experiences as Jewish women. The images explore the process of making by women responsible for their own modes of storytelling. Within every image, and in the relationships between images throughout the series, there are structures and collapses, strengths and ruins, truth and fiction. With this constant assembling and revising, our memory builds in front of us as we photograph it.

Words and Pictures by Hannah Altman.

Hannah Altman is a Jewish American artist from New Jersey. Her photographic work considers relationships between body, interiority, feminine performance, lineage, and the structures that perpetuate them. She is an MFA candidate at Virginia Commonwealth University.. Find her on PHmuseum and Instagram.

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This feature is part of Story of the Week, a selection of relevant projects from our community handpicked by the PHmuseum curators.