Out My Window

Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window comes to mind when looking at Gail Albert Halaban’s book of photographs of city dwellers peering into their neighbors’ windows, Out My Window. The photographs are views across streets, alleyways, and airshafts, peering through windows to reveal intimate portraits. A couple play with their baby, a family prepares dinner, a single woman paints her apartment. These beautiful color pictures of voyeuristic architectural landscapes capture both the intimacy and remoteness of life lived in the proximity of so many strangers. The photographs capture the vast city landscape, and within the landscape, floating high above the ground, are portraits of strangers caught in private moments. Out My Window explores the contradictory impulses of metropolitan life: the desire to connect and the need to be left alone.