Gail Albert Halaban: Out my Window, Vis à Vis
March 31st - May 2nd, 2015
Tuesday, March 31st, 2015, from 6pm to 9pm, the artist will be present

Far from being a paparazza, the American artist Gail Albert Halaban invites herself in the intimacy of the inhabitants of New York or Paris - an elegant way to draw the portraits of theses two major cities and those who live there. The approach of the artist is to get in contact with the individuals she photographs through the phone book. Most of the time, they accept and allow Gail Albert Halaban to create links between those neighbors we usually only observe out the window or simply meet in the lobby.

Staged, these pictures evolve from landscapes into genre scenes and into portraits. Small theaters where the light is on and where individuals paused in the banality of their everyday life: the kids are taking their bath, we prepare our meals, watch television, or just dream at the window - all stories the photographer lets us imagine the end.

Publication:
Vis à Vis - Photographs by Gail Albert Halaban, forewords by Cathy Rémy 375 x 285 mm - 128 pages - 55 euros
Editions La Martinière

Gail Albert Halaban
Born in 1970, in Washington, American artist Gail Albert Halaban studied photography at the Rhode Island School of Design and at the University of Yale. Working as a commercial photographer, she also creates a personal work in the form of series that question the landscape and society. Long fascinated by the work of painter Edward Hopper, she returns to the scene painted by the artist in her series Hopper Redux. For her Out My Window series, made in New York and followed by Vis-à-Vis in Paris, she photographed apartment buildings, which light up as small theaters, where individuals appear in the banality of their everyday life. The impression of voyeurism we get looking at these spectacular cityscapes disappears when we know how the artist proceed: “I photograph from one residence into the window of another with the consent of both parties using a normal focal length lens. The process of making the photographs connects neighbor to neighbor.” The photographer thus creates a new vision of New York, showing the reality of neighbors on the scale of buildings, both distant and close. Series are regularly exhibited and published. Her last book, Vis-à-Vis, has just been published in French by the Editions La Martinière.