Gail Albert Halaban

Gail Albert Halaban Biography 

Gail Albert Halaban is a New York-based, American fine art photographer. Born in Washington, D.C. in 1970, Halaban went on to attend the Rhode Island School of Design and would later earn a BA from Brown University and a Master of Fine Arts in photography from Yale University School of Art. 

As a photographer, Gail Albert Halaban has received widespread acclaim for her striking, large-scale photographs. Her photographs have also been published in noteworthy publications including The Huffington Post, The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Time, and Le Monde. Halaban has become particularly well noted for her large-scale photographs of women and urban cityscapes. 

These works came to the fore after a string of highly successful exhibitions. Gail Albert Halaban’s photography has been exhibited widely across both solo and group shows, including an exhibit at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, in 2018.

In her exhibitions, About Thirty and This Stage of Motherhood, Gail Albert Halaban turned her artistic lens to womanhood. Halaban’s latest project, Out My Window, features voyeuristic landscapes in urban settings. The project features an ongoing series of photographs exploring the nature of the modern community. 

Gail Albert Halaban has taken a collaborative and participatory approach to her Out My Window project, in which participants photograph each person in their home from a neighboring window. The project is designed to facilitate social engagement and interaction between neighboring strangers in our anonymous cities and to encourage inhabitants to view their neighborhoods from a new perspective.  

Gail Albert Halaban has also published a series of photographic monographs to accompany her projects. The artist’s 2012 Out My Window project is accompanied by its own photographic publication comprising large color photographs of everyday urban scenes and the rhythms of metropolitan life. 

Gail Albert Halaban has also published two subsequent monographs, Paris Views and Italian Views, which act as a continuation of the 2012 Out My Window series. 

In Paris Views, Halaban turns her focus from urban New York to Paris to create an archive of images taken in the year between 2012 and 2013 reflecting Parisian life through the windows of neighbors and the city’s many diverse communities. The collection juxtaposes the intimacies of daily life and private worlds with cinematic, atmospheric cityscapes, to reflect the blurred lines between reality and fantasy, metropolis and loneliness, the personal and the mysterious. 

In Italian Views, Gail Albert Halaban shifts her lens once more, now to life in Italy. Here the artist collates voyeuristic images of city life in Rome, Milan, Florence, Naples, Venice, Lucca, and Palermo. Halaban worked meticulously with local residents in these cities to collaborate on each portrait of life and gain access to the private lives of ordinary Italian people. 

Through her projects, Gail Albert Halaban illuminates the tensions, emotions, and identities bound up in our city communities and fueled by our urban lifestyles. In each of these projects, Halaban explores notions of intimacy, isolation, subjectivity, neighborly perception, and daily life.