Gail Albert Halaban
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This series by Gail Albert Balaban titled 'Out my Window' captures views from her New York Apartment. Her work explores the gap between public and private life, what is seen and what is hidden. I am reminded of a quote from Hitchcock's Rear Window; “thats a secret private world you're looking into over there- people do a lot of things they cant explain in public.”
She acknowledges unspoken voyeurism and exhibitionism, and urges us to admit that we all do it.
What surprised me about these images was that they are all staged; all subjects are collaborators with Halaban who have all consented and whose apartments have been lit to allow the image to be successful. This contrasts to the feel of voyeurism the images give and the photographer is no longer an intrusive outsider, but an insider, and the feel of the photographs loose their authenticity as a voyeur; but become more empathic. She describes herself as a 'Friendly window watcher'.
The inspiration for this series came from when her son was a newborn and she would be woken up in the middle of the night by him crying. She would look out of the window and wonder about the stories behind the windows. Years later when he was ill in hospital and she had to find a way of completing a project which she was meant to be in Amsterdam for, she took note of how remote all the technology is, that the doctors were monitoring her son from another room, another floor even, and how she could look at the world in the same way.
“I barely knew anyone in the city. But even in the middle of the night, I didn’t feel lonely, I could see people spilling from a nightclub, the flower shops opening in the predawn. And, at times, in the most intimate of moments as I held my daughter, I would search the windows of others, and caught people returning my gaze.”
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