OUT MY WINDOW
Gail Albert Halaban
This project started when I was hosting a first birthday party for my daughter (now twenty). My neighbors across the street (Starbright Floral Design) sent us balloons, flowers, and a note wishing her a happy birthday. We had never met but they had been watching us through the window. I had mixed feelings - it was a little creepy but also really friendly. I wondered - is this normal? Do neighbors admit spying on neighbors in New York? This sent me on a two-decade exploration of the relationship between neighbors across the window space in cities around the globe. I photograph from one window to a neighboring window with the consent and collaboration of the neighbors. As I make the pictures, neighbors have shared with me the imagined stories of the lives of the neighbors across the way.
In this interactive site, you can not only see the pictures but I am also sharing the stories that neighbors have made up about each other. This work embraces the fantasies we all project on our neighbors. The grass is always greener. The person across the way is living a more exciting/rich/fulfilling life - they never seem to be leaving their socks on the floor. The photographs are operatic in scale (please zoom in on them), richly lit with the real life furniture and possessions of those photographed morphing into gorgeous stage sets. In this work, I have leaned into making the lives of our neighbors bigger than life—dramatic operas that pull us in. This ongoing project is a love letter to the city I call home.
Gail Albert Halaban is an American artist born in Washington, DC. Her interest in photography began when she made a pinhole camera for her first-grade science fair. Though her equipment has become more complex, her love of photography has never wavered. Her work plays with the notions of truth and fiction - straddling the line between documentary and staged. She attended the Rhode Island School of Design, Brown University, and Yale University, from which she received a Master of Fine Arts in Photography. She teaches at Columbia University in the Department of Narrative Medicine. She has been published widely including three monographs. Her work has been exhibited extensively in solo and group shows including a solo exhibit in 2018 at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York. Numerous galleries around the world have shown her work with her primary representation at the Jackson Fine Arts in Atlanta, and Weinstein Hammons in Minneapolis. Public and private collections including the Hermes Foundation, George Eastman Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, Nelson Atkins Museum, Getty Museum, Cape Ann Museum, Wichita Art Museum, Minneapolis Institute of art hold her work.
She has published three monographs: Out My Window (Powerhouse,2012), Vis à Vis (Éditions de La Martinière 2014), Italian Views (Aperture, 2019)
