Hannah Altman
Haircut, 2017
8½ x 11" Archival pigment print
6½ x 9" Image sizeEdition of 22
Each print includes a certificate of authenticity, numbered and hand-signed by the artist.
About the Image
Haircut is part of a series called Float With Both Feet, which explores fabricated narratives in relation to feminine structures. The project considers interconnected gestures between the body and its surrounding environment, considering the intricate web of relationships that are upheld between subject, object, and maker. The portraits exist in this sort of dreamlike state, not quite here, nor there, but always very present.
I developed this longer form project throughout most of my undergraduate college years, which is a space of rapid change - of becoming and unbecoming - and that’s really what Haircut is about. It is organic in the way that this South Oakland of Pittsburgh apartment DIY haircut happened and is the site of a documentation of change, but it is fabricated in the sense that the slice of hair across the back itself is very much staged as a remnant. Through that performance of change there is this permanence in the presence of what is left behind.Artist Bio
Hannah Altman is a Jewish-American artist from New Jersey. She holds an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Through photographic based media, her work interprets relationships between gestures, the body, lineage, and interior space.
She has recently exhibited with the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Blue Sky Gallery, the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, and Photoville Festival. Her work has been featured in publications such as Vanity Fair, Carnegie Museum of Art Storyboard, Huffington Post, New York Times, Fotoroom, Cosmopolitan, i-D, and British Journal of Photography. She was the recipient of the 2019 Bertha Anolic Israel Travel Award and included in the 2020 Critical Mass and Lenscratch Student Prize Finalists.
She has delivered lectures on her work and research across the country, including Yale University and the Society for Photographic Education National Conference. Her first monograph Kavana, published by Kris Graves Projects, is in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Thomas J Watson Library.