Merry Alpern "Dirty Windows, 1993-4"

In the autumn of 2026, Galerie Miranda presents Merry Alpern’s iconic series "Dirty Windows" at Paris Photo—the first time this major body of work has been exhibited at an art fair. For this exceptional presentation, the gallery brings together vintage gelatin silver prints alongside a selection of contemporary gelatin silver prints produced by the artist, and previewed at Paris Photo.

Dirty Windows: During the winter of 1993–1994, photographer Merry Alpern visited a friend’s New York loft in the Wall Street district. He took her to a room at the back of the apartment; looking out the window, she spotted a tiny bathroom window one floor down, from which the heavy bass of nightclub music drifted out. She realized she had a view into the bathroom of an illicit lap dance club, where "stockbrokers and other wealthy businessmen handed over hundreds of dollars and drugs to women in thongs and black lace lingerie." Fascinated by the spectacle, the artist began photographing the scene using high-speed black-and-white film, lending the images a film noir aesthetic.

Later, in an interview, Merry Alpern was asked about her feelings while photographing these scenes as a female photographer. She replied: "Although the concept of the 'female gaze' never really interested me, as a woman, I could project some of my own experiences onto that pantomime behind the window... At the same time, there was an anthropological aspect: observing completely ordinary scenes in the world of men. Observing the bathroom habits of the opposite sex was a revelation."

In 1994, Alpern received a grant from the NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) for this series, but her work—like that of Andres Serrano and Barbara DeGenevieve—was subsequently rejected and vilified by conservatives seeking to discredit the arts institution. This controversy sparked a widespread debate that, paradoxically, helped bring the work to public attention.

Today, prints from the "Dirty Windows" series are held in major private and museum collections, including those of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, New York), the National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington, D.C.), and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Works from the series were exhibited at the Fondation Cartier in Paris (1996) as part of the group exhibition By Night and at Tate Modern (2010) in the exhibition Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera, where the complete series of 37 prints was shown. More recently, they were featured in the exhibition Public, Private, Secret at the ICP Museum in New York, 2016-17.

Created before the advent of social media, these images—at once poetic and raw—of New York’s hidden side remain strikingly relevant, raising numerous questions regarding the sexual exploitation of women, consumerism, power, finance, surveillance, and the female gaze.

Merry Alpern is represented exclusively by Galerie Miranda.