« I’ve been spying on my neighbors. It’s gone on for decades. The Manhattan apartment where I grew up faces hundreds of windows, each providing its own show, in a vast array whose delights grew up around me. As a child, in the nights leading up to Christmas, I would spend hours looking into windows, counting how many were decorated with lights. When I got older, I’d scan the same windowscape for distant figures in states of undress. Through the 1970s and 1980s, we marked Passover by gazing out our dining room window to another family’s Seder, across the way and a few floors down. Year after year, the family was there, its home gleaming with candles and good silver, a constant part of our sacred tradition. We never knew their names or exchanged a word with them. Yet what we surely knew, but never talked about, was that they, and our other windowneighbors, were watching us, too. However, to acknowledge the gaze would be mortifying. Even now, I have a hard time admitting having watched. And I hope my neighbors don’t read this. »
Gail Albert Halaban
Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window comes to mind when looking at Gail Albert Halaban’s book of photographs of city dwellers peering into their neighbors’ windows, Out My Window. The photographs are views across streets, alleyways, and airshafts, peering through windows to reveal intimate portraits. A couple play with their baby, a family prepares dinner, a single woman paints her apartment. These beautiful color pictures of voyeuristic architectural landscapes capture both the intimacy and remoteness of life lived in the proximity of so many strangers. The photographs capture the vast city landscape, and within the landscape, floating high above the ground, are portraits of strangers caught in private moments. Out My Window explores the contradictory impulses of metropolitan life: the desire to connect and the need to be left alone.
Gail Albert Halaban is an American fine art photographer. Halaban earned her BA from Brown University and her MFA from the Yale University School of Art. She is noted for her large-scale photographs of women, seen in her exhibitions “About Thirty” and “This Stage of Motherhood” and the urban, voyeuristic landscapes on display in Out My Window. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, New York magazine, The New Yorker, and Time. Her fine art photography has been internationally exhibited. Gail Albert Halaban is represented by Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York City.
BOOK
OUT MY WINDOW de Gail Albert Halaban
Introductions by Vernon Silver Published by powerHouse Books.
Hardcover, 12.5 x 10 inches, 92 pages, 225 color photographs.
ISBN: 978-1-57687-612-1, $50
GALLERY
Edwynn Houk Gallery
745 Fifth Avenue,
New York, NY 10151
www.houkgallery.com
