Hannah Altman Launches Exhibition Retracing The Journey of Holocaust Victim Lore Sternfeld

Emma Breitman: How did you approach creating work using lenses with such a complicated history?

Hannah Altman: Very tenderly, actually. Most objects produced in Germany in the 1940s, including these lenses, served fascism. Lore was able to stay alive until 1943 by making lenses that were presumably being used for Nazi propaganda.

But the lenses themselves are very delicate objects. Nearly eighty years old, they require a gentle hand. I worked with a set of six different focal lengths ranging from 28mm to 100mm, each with its own distinct way of treating light as it passed through the glass. The manual focus was often soft, there is a lot of vignetting on the wider lenses, and a lot of the images are marked by these sort of ghostly lens flares. 

Instead of aiming for technical perfection, I leaned in to their characteristics, letting their treatment of light guide the photographs. There is a lot of unclear information around Lore’s story, and this work acknowledges that visually through the technical aspects of the camera.

EB: These lenses hold the added history of being used for Nazi propaganda. Did that impact your process in any way?

HA: Working with these lenses had me thinking about the afterlives of material objects. These lenses were born from a system of violence and exploitation, but they outlived the regime that produced them. I found myself asking what it means to handle such objects, and what kinds of stories they might be made to tell. In that sense, using them to create images that gave shape to Lore's interior world felt like a necessary redirection of their purpose. Now the light that moves through them forms notions of care and imagination and remembrance. 

EB: Did working with such historically potent lenses during a time period of increased political extremism inform your work?

HA: Yes and no. Frankly, this project was extremely immersive. For several months, I felt somewhat outside of my body and outside of time; not entirely in the past, but not fully in the present either. My attention was deeply focused on Lore's life: we have quite limited information about her story, and the impossibility of knowing everything really allowed the work to deepen through empathetic speculation. Contemporary politics often felt distant while I was making the actual work, because Lore’s story is not a metaphor.

But working with lenses manufactured under the Nazi regime made these complications feel materially present. I wasn’t dealing with abstract historical artifacts. I was holding objects in the present that carried the past. It's impossible to work around fascism, antisemitism, and state violence without becoming more attuned to their various echoes in the present. At the center of the work are the ways histories continue to reverberate. Photography has a unique way of fostering empathy in that way. The lenses had me thinking about the then/now feeling of preservation, and how remembrance often is carried in ordinary objects that continue to move through the world long after the people who made and used them are gone.

EB: The use of props has been central to your work across the years. How did you go about selecting objects for this series?

HA: The small details that make up the work were meticulously sourced. What I was wearing, what I was holding, and what the environment looked like all helped shape the narrative world I was building. Props are a kind of visual language. They carry information.

I spent a lot of time researching late 1930s and early 1940s German fashion. Everything seemed to have a collar, lots of button-down dresses, simple fabrics, modest silhouettes, and headscarves. A particular Aryan ideal was being constructed through clothing, and I wanted the outfits to feel historically grounded while sitting slightly outside of that idealized image. The same thinking informed the hairstyle. I cut nearly a foot off my hair for the project, leaving it in a grown-out, uneven bob that felt more realistic for someone living through instability than a carefully maintained period look.

The props themselves were largely sourced with the help of my dear friend Kate Holyroyd (shoutout Kate!!), who lives in Berlin. She spent several months thrifting on my behalf before I arrived. Together, we sourced objects that felt ordinary rather than precious, items that might have been in this kind of environment. I was less interested in finding perfect historical replicas than in gathering objects that could help evoke the texture of a life, things that get carried, repaired, lost, and remembered. 

EB: Outside of Lore Sternfeld’s history, were there any essential texts or iconographies that helped you formulate this body of work?

HA: An image that really shaped the work was one of the secret photographs made in Auschwitz by Sonderkommando Alberto Errera. The photograph is blurred and fragmentary; it depicts a group of naked women on their way to the gas chamber at Auschwitz II in August 1944. It is one of the few visual records made from within the machinery of extermination.

I returned to that image a lot. It raises difficult questions about visibility and the limits of representation. So much of Lore's story exists beyond what can be photographed. Her historical record has gaps, silences, and unknowable details. In the context of this project, photography serves only partially as a tool for preserving history. It is mostly a record of what remains out of reach.

We do know that Lore waited in that forest to die. I made a portrait in the same location, with my face blurred and the branches bare around me. The gesture was not intended as a reenactment, but as an acknowledgment of those limits. So much of this project is a recognition that there are aspects of her experience that can never be fully recovered, only approached with empathy. 

EB: As part of the project, you boarded a train to Auschwitz, mirroring Sternfeld’s own experience. What was that like for you, and what impact did it have on your work?

HA: When Lore was deported from Berlin to Auschwitz on January 29, 1943, it was evening. So I took the night train. Photographically, this was very difficult. There was almost nothing to document outside the windows except an endless expanse of darkness. The landscape was largely inaccessible. Rather than fighting that limitation, I leaned into it. The images got pretty abstract: reflections in glass, soft focus, fleeting points of light, a sense of isolation and suspension.

The train reinforced the biggest challenge of the project. We know the date, the time, even the weather conditions of her deportation. These aspects of Lore's life can be researched and reconstructed, but so much remains unknowable. Sitting on that train, moving through the dark, I was very aware of that distinction. Whatever thoughts, fears, or hopes she carried with her on that journey are ultimately hers. Beyond my reach.

The photographs made on the train reflect that uncertainty. I do not think they are really illustrative of a historical event. They inhabit a space of not knowing. The train very much felt like history giving way to absence and speculation, and hoping to honor it anyway.

EB: What do you hope visitors take away from this exhibition?  

HA: More than anything, I hope visitors spend time with Lore. Her life survives in fragments. There’s a handful of photographs, a few archival documents, and of course, these lenses. This project sits with those fragments and imagines the person who existed within them.

I don't think photography can recover a lost life in its entirety, nor do I think it can solve the gaps in the historical record. But I do think it can create space for empathy, attention, and witnessing. There is something especially meaningful about presenting this work in the former home of Rudolf Höss, a site directly associated with Lore’s murder. In a really meaningful way, this exhibition shifts the focus from the Nazi to the Jew whose life was taken.

If visitors leave feeling a connection to Lore while also recognizing the limits of what can be known about her, then the exhibition has done what I hoped it would do.