Here are some links to press about 4 bodies of work:
Vis A Vis, Hopper, Out My Window, and This Stage of Motherhood. Currently I am working on a global photography project.
Vis A Vis, Hopper, Out My Window, and This Stage of Motherhood. Currently I am working on a global photography project.
Vis a Vis:
Hopper:
Out My Window
In Out My Window, Gail Albert Halaban has ventured into the private spaces of New York City, photographing its inhabitants and the views that define their lives. In a world framed by windows, there is both an intimacy and remoteness in the proximity of so many strangers. Though the archetype of the photographer training her lens on her neighbor is easily associated with the voyeurism of Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, the experience Albert Halaban records is far less menacing. In as much as we are aware of our display, the city is also on display to us. Window and camera are inextricably bound in the framing of a world.
New York is iconically identified with the view, and particularly the skyline — those swathes of horizon and bands of light pierced by familiar skyscrapers. But as often as not, the everyday life of New Yorkers is visually defined not by these icons, but rather the more quotidian views of each other's private spaces: the couple across the air shaft, the professional across the street. Proximity both highlights and abolishes such boundaries. Floating thirty stories high above the bustling city below, there is a comfort seeing one's neighbor. They are strangers perhaps only in the sense that they may not know each other's names. Though a word may never be spoken between the two, there is an indelible connection offered by a shared, reciprocal view. While adopting the visual language of photojournalism and its anthropological approach, Albert Halaban also finds precedence in the characters of Edward Hopper's universe, using architecture to suggest the inner psychology of her subject and the subtle interactions of urban life. As with her earlier bodies of work, Albert Halaban has delved into the lives of her subjects, narrating their anxieties and desires through the small gestures, habits, and minor events that make up the rhythm of their lives.
The New York Times
March 13, 2009
Ken Johnson
March 13, 2009
Ken Johnson
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.
The New Yorker
March 16, 2009
Vince Aletti
March 16, 2009
Vince Aletti
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 couple cuddle with their baby; the solitary stand in Hopperseque isolation. The fact that Halaban has stages 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.
Some more links:
Huffington Post New York Times Slide Show
This Stage of Motherhood:
Gail Albert Halaban photographs communities of mothers. Like an anthropologist, she portrays the private lives of these women as they journey from single life through motherhood. At first glance, they seem to have everything — education, elegance, wealth, and family. Yet for these women, such advantages are not without conflict. They must weigh having children with the desire to maintain an identity as it was prior to entering this stage of motherhood. Gail Albert Halaban's satiric yet compassionate images illuminate their struggle to balance their children's need for an emotionally available mother with their own inclination to hold onto the independence of youth.
Although the photographs in This Stage of Motherhood seem to be spontaneously captured, they are in fact intricate tableaux created by the artist within the homes of the women she photographs. This theatricality grants Gail Albert Halaban intimate access to the emotional lives of her subjects.
Gail Albert Halaban was born in 1970 in Washington, DC. 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 has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and W. The work in this exhibition will be featured simultaneously in the Winter 2006 issue of Aperture.
The New Yorker
January 8, 2007
January 8, 2007
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 believe every one, even if you'd rather not.
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