Indoor Voices

Hannah Altman is a Jewish American artist from New Jersey. Her work considers relationships between body, interiority, feminine performance, lineage, and the structures that perpetuate them using photographic based media.

By engaging with imagery over the last five years, my mother and I have been building Indoor Voices around intergenerational 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. As the project continues, we construct more narratives to the mundane, to the transformative, to our lives.

The images are made with consideration to Jewish folklore narrative structures and matrilineal gender performance. As with such stories, they exist uneasily between the realm of truth and the sentimental. As with femininity, aspects of the work are carefully choreographed and orchestrated. This intricate dynamic between the portrayed and the portrayal are central interests for the project. Within every image, and in the relationships between images, there are structures and collapses, strengths and ruins, transformation and stagnancy. I think the certitude of the relationship between my mother and me exists in this overlapping, intangible space, and with this constant assembling and revising, our memory builds in front of us as we photograph it.