Moment: Hannah Altman

©Hannah Altman

Text and Image by Hannah Altman

I spent the first few years of the pandemic housesitting a cottage in a small beach town in Rhode Island. In the slow pace of my new environment, I found myself reading a lot of Jewish folklore, and became interested in photographing their narrative devices to visualize the texts. Casting myself as the characters and the house as the setting, I was exploring the ways that Jewish stories use motif repetition and circular narratives to build their worlds.

I had been drawn to these windows at the top of the house for months - one being a near exact mirror of the other, the two of them angled towards each other as if caught in a whisper. I wanted to lean into this sense of circularity. To throw this line from the dark center of one windowpane to the other, to climb across, would put me in the exact same environment, disrupted briefly by a moment suspended Elsewhere.

To view more of Hannah’s work visit her website here