Gail Albert-Halaban (born Gail Hilary Albert, 1970, in Washington, DC) is an American fine art and commercial photographer. She is noted for her large scale photographs of women and urban, voyeuristic landscapes.
About ‘Out My Window‘:
What we can see out in the sunlight is always less interesting than what we can perceive taking place behind a pane of window glass. In that pit, in that blackness or brightness, life is being lived, life is suffering, life is dreaming. Baudelaire, Windows
In Out My Window, Gail Albert Halaban has ventured into urban spaces by photographing its inhabitants and the opinions that define their lives.In a world framed by windows, there is an intimacy and a distance in the vicinity of so many strangers. Window and camera are inextricably linked in the frame of a world.
Initially, Ms. Halaban’s paintings resemble formal studies in which architectural grids create syncopated and all-over visual rhythms.Then notice that there are people in some apartments. None of them is doing anything exciting. There is no sex or violence.But there is something compelling about being able to see in the private worlds of ordinary people. The voyeuristic effect, slightly melancholic, recalls some paintings by Edward Hopper.
Mrs. Halaban also took photographs of people while they were in their apartments with them, and they have a moving intimacy.While photographs taken from distant windows suggest a kind of surveillance, in fact Mrs. Halaban has collaborated with her subjects and asked them to pose and position themselves in their homes for the camera.So these are a form of portraiture. Even the scale is important. Because people are so small in proportion to the whole picture, there is an expansive effect. And for the same reason, there is a sense of social breadth: so many buildings, so many people, so many stories in the big city.
All photographs by Gail Albert Halaban Courtesy of Edwynn Houk Gallery.