Window Watchers in a City of Strangers

My work is featured in today's New York Times article "Window Watchers in a City of Strangers"

Be sure to check out the audio slideshow.

Mom Culture Interview

Mom Culture just posted an interview with me.

When did you realize you loved photography and at what moment did you realize you could do this professionally?

I have loved photography since my first grade science fair when my mom and I made a pinhole camera out of an oatmeal cereal box. I didn’t decide to do it professionally until after college where I was a pre-med student. I didn’t really think of it as a real job but my parents encouraged me to give it a whirl. I went to graduate school for an MFA instead of Med School.

Read the rest of the interview here.

Interview at Examiner.com

Lorenzo Dominguez interviewed me back in March for Examiner.com. You can read the interview here.

Yossi Milo Gallery - Sexy and the City

I will be in Sexy and the City, the upcoming group show at Yossi Milo Gallery. It is part of the citywide show "New York Photographs." For more information go to yossimilo.com

Sexy and the City

New York Photographs
July 9, 2009–August 28, 2009

Yossi Milo Gallery is pleased to announce Sexy and the City, a summer group show on view from Thursday, July 9, through Friday, August 28, 2009.

Sexy and the City shows the alluring, romantic and sometimes scandalous side of New York’s people and places. Capturing private, intimate moments and blatant displays of sexuality, these photographs span the decades from the 1940s to the present day, taken in landmark locations like the Brooklyn Bridge and in the quiet, out-of-the-way corners of the city.

From Alfred Eisenstaedt’s iconic image of a kissing couple in Times Square on V-J Day, 1945, to Nan Goldin’s drag queen on an anonymous New York street in the 1990s, from Garry Winogrand’s topless woman surrounded by a crowd in Central Park to the homosexual couples photographed by Alvin Baltrop in the seclusion of the West Side piers, Sexy and the City celebrates diverse views of New York City passion.

Among the artists featured in the exhibition are Merry Alpern, Will Anderson, Diane Arbus, Alvin Baltrop, Bruce Davidson, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Mitch Epstein, Louis Faurer, Leonard Freed, Nan Goldin, Gail Albert Halaban, Charles Harbutt, Lisa Kereszi, André Kertész, Arthur Leipzig, Leon Levinstein, Joel Meyerowitz, Duane Michals, Tod Papageorge, Frank Paulin, Anton Perich, Charles Traub, Arthur Tress, Weegee, Ryan Weideman, and Garry Winogrand.

This show is part of the citywide exhibition NEW YORK PHOTOGRAPHS. A number of galleries specializing in photography have joined forces to present over a dozen gallery shows this summer featuring views and perspectives on New York City. Other participating galleries include Bonni Benrubi, Danziger Projects, Deborah Bell, Edwynn Houk, Howard Greenberg, Hasted Hunt, Janet Borden, Laurence Miller, Pace/MacGill, Robert Mann, Julie Saul, and Yancey Richardson.

The New York Times - Art in Review

From the New York Times:

Alfred Hitchcock's ''Rear Window'' comes readily to mind when you look at Gail Albert Halaban's large color photographs. Most depict tall New York apartment buildings viewed from a high window opposite.

Initially, Ms. Halaban's pictures resemble formal studies in which architectural grids create syncopating, all-over visual rhythms. Then you notice that there are people in some of the apartments. None of them are doing anything exciting. There is no sex or violence. But there is something compelling about being able to see into the private worlds of ordinary people. The voyeuristic, slightly melancholy effect recalls certain paintings by Edward Hopper.

Ms. Halaban also took pictures of people while in their apartments with them, and these have a poignant intimacy. They resemble photographs by Philip-Lorca diCorcia. One breathtaking example shows a woman wrapped in a bath towel sitting on the edge of her bathtub and gazing out through glass walls over the city.

While the photographs shot from distant windows suggest a kind of surveillance, in fact Ms. Halaban collaborated with her subjects and asked them to pose and position themselves in their homes for the camera. So they are a form of portraiture. Scale is important too. Because the people are so tiny in proportion to the whole picture, there is an expansive effect. And for the same reason, there is a sense of social amplitude: so many buildings, so many people, so many stories in the big city. KEN JOHNSON

The New Yorker - March 16, 2009

From The New Yorker:

GAIL ALBERT HALABAN
Like so many New Yorkers, Halaban can’t help staring into her neighbors’ windows, but she’s made an art of it. Most of her big color photographs are views across streets, alleyways, or airshafts into apartments. A man plays with his dog; a young couple cuddle with their baby; the solitary stand in Hopperesque isolation. The fact that Halaban has staged these moments doesn’t make them any less resonant of the contradictory impulses of metropolitan life: the desire to connect and the need to be left alone. Voyeurs will be frustrated by Halaban’s polite scenarios, but she’s playing the good neighbor. Through March 28. (Mann, 210 Eleventh Ave., at 24th St. 212-989-7600.)

Artnet - Evacuation of the West

From Charlie Finch's review of the recent MoMA show, "Into the Sunset: Photography’s Image of the American West":

"One would never know from this narrow selection that Gail Albert-Halaban snapped an energetic and widely praised series of the young women of Los Angeles, a few years back. That series alone, with its barriastas, Malibu socialites, teen drifters and blue collar Moms, in its range of emotions and

experiences puts the whole curation of "Into the Sunset" to deserved shame."

You can read the full review here.

WNYC Radio Interview

WNYC interviewed me and posted an audio slideshow with me about my Out My Window Project. Watch it at wnyc.org.

Elle Decor - Report from NYC: Love the neighbour

Elle Decor posted about my Out My Window project back in March. Read it here.

The New Yorker - January 8, 2007

GAIL ALBERT HALABAN

Halaban, a photographer whose previous work concerned groups of wealthy, social young women at their leisure, has followed similarly privileged women into motherhood. The Results-big boffo color pictures that look like tina Barney crossed with Lauren Greenfield- are more emphatic, more satirical, and more complicated than before, perhaps because they reflect their subjects' ambivalence toward nagging new responsibilities. Halaban can be heavy-handed (one woman on a rattan chaise holds up a flash card for her son to read; "WANT," it says, pointedly), but she stages these images so deftly that you can believe every one, even if you'd rather not. Through Jan. 6. (Mann, 210 Eleventh Ave., at 24th St. 212-989-7600.)

The New Yorker - March 31, 2003

GAIL ALBERT HALABAN

The Margaret Mead (or at least the Tina Barney) of upscale, thirtyish Los Angeles women - those who gather on a Tuesday afternoon to compare engagement rings and have private yoga lessons at home. Albert-Halaban documents ritual and banality alike; her pedicured friends spend time at the gym, at the salon, in the shoe stores, and in pottery classes. One woman with a Xanax-tranquil expression, shown without friends, shares a bag of cherries with her young daughter in a fortresslike enclosure by the pool. In another image, an innocuous game of Scrabble is made slightly menacing by the presence of the word N-E-S-T-E-R-S on the board. Through April 12. (Meyerowitz, 120 Eleventh Ave. 212-414-2770.)

New York Times - This Stage of Motherhood

March 2003 review in the New York Times.

GAIL ALBERT-HALABAN, ''About Thirty,'' Ariel Meyerowitz, 120 11th Avenue, at 20th Street, (212) 414-2770 (through April 12). Like Tina Barney and Nan Goldin, Ms. Albert-Halaban uses her camera like an anthropologist. The expertly made pictures here focus on the domestic and recreational lives of West Coast career women, all in their 30's. Shopping for shoes, comparing diamond rings, doing yoga exercises, tending their children, her subjects visibly enjoy the privileges of their class, yet one senses throughout the series a certain anxious ennui (Johnson).

Aperture Magazine - Friends With Money

This Stage of Motherhood was featured in the Winter 2006 issue of Aperture Magazine. You can read the pdf here.

The Sister Project Interview

The Sister Project interviewed me as part of their Galleries series. Read it here.

Upper East Side Neighbors

Looking into Riverside Park

28th Street Factory

Jill with tea cup

Chelsea Glass House

Click above for audio interviews.

Lou From Anita's Window

Neighbors across the airshaft

West Village Construction

A city mom - 6 kids in the heart of NYC

Out Gabe's Window

Going away party.

Out my window Brooklyn.

Living in a fishbowl. New construction on 6th avenue in Chelsea.

Next Door Neighbors

These two neighbors never met but look into each other's windows.  

I like the water towers, the way we are close enough to see people’s expressions and read their moods while being out of sight.

Waking to the sound of the train out her window.