When the photographer Gail Albert Halaban first moved to New York from Los Angeles in 2004, she and her newborn daughter, Zoë, liked to look into apartment windows and imagine what the lives of the city’s residents were like.
“We’d make up stories about what was happening,” Ms. Albert Halaban said in a recent video call from her apartment in Chelsea. The tradition continued with her son, Jonah.
That spirit endures in an ongoing photography project, “Out My Window,” which Ms. Albert Halaban has now been working on for more than 20 years. The idea for the project, which has come to span more than 25 cities on five continents, is to reveal the lives of city dwellers from an apartment window across the street, creating Edward Hopper-esque landscapes of city life with the collaboration of a neighbor.
“The goal is always to see everybody engaged, for it to be about community,” she said. “It’s not really about the picture. The picture is almost the bonus of a friendship or relationship made.”
