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Growing Up and Coming Home with Gail Albert Halaban
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One of 8 million stories in the Naked City—Out My Window, Astoria, Night Bridges, 2008
© Gail Albert Halaban, Courtesy Robert Mann Gallery. The creation of these photographs
was funded in part by the Design Trust for Public Space.
Artists aren’t always lonely, lonesome creatures living hand to mouth, squatting in abandoned buildings, scratching and clawing just enough to make a living, so that we can spend all of our free time doing what we are meant to do—create art.
No, most of us are really quite normal, everyday people who work and love and eat and have babies from time to time, much like everyone else.
The primary difference between us and them though is that as writers, playwrights, actors, painters, poets and photographers many of us like to express what we experience though our work, so that in essence our art becomes the window into the soul of the human experience.
Take Gail Albert Halaban for instance, she just had her second child three weeks ago, which happened to coincide with the opening of her second solo exhibition at the Robert Mann Gallery. (This is actually her third solo show in New York City. Her first, About Thirty, was presented by the Ariel Meyerowitz Gallery.)
In her latest series, Out My Window, Gail has ventured into the private spaces of her fellow New Yorkers, photographing both its inhabitants and the views that they offer, views that often define our everyday lives. In a world framed by so many windows, there is both an intimacy and remoteness seen in the close-up view of the New York cityscape, one that reflects the notion that there are indeed 8 million stories in the Naked City.
On March 31 I had the opportunity to speak with Gail at length about her work. Following are excerpts from our conversation.
When did you start photography?
I’ve been taking pictures since I was six. My mother and I made a pinhole camera for my first grade science fair and I took pictures of Buttons the black cat.
Is your mother a photographer?
My mother loved taking pictures—ironically, mostly of doors and windows. However, she wasn’t the greatest photographer, but she loved the craft and always had a darkroom.
Moreover, like my father, she loves art. Both of them are docents at the Smithsonian.
What is your fascination with the ordinary?
I’ve always loved photographing my peers. I took pictures for my high school yearbook, for the school newspaper, and for my college thesis at Brown, "The Evolution of Social Documentary Photography," I documented girls at prep schools in Los Angeles.
I take a very personal approach to my work, because I believe a photo succeeds when it is about something specific. Thus, the better I know a subject, the more likely I am at taking a good picture.
You studied for an MFA in photography at Yale in 1996, how did that influence your work?
While I was there, there was a huge battle between Nan Goldin and Gregory Crewdson. Nan advocated the documentation of reality and Greg believed in staging psychological drama.
My work is the marriage of the two.
I suppose that explains why although your shots capture seemingly spontaneous everyday scenes of everyday life, they also seem somewhat staged. Tell me about the evolution of your philosophy and the process by which you take to create your photos.
When I was about thirty, I moved to LA and I was compelled to explore how my peers had changed since we had graduated from Brown University in Providence, RI, ten years earlier.
Subsequently, I spent 8 years photographing two projects: About Thirty while I was in Los Angeles and This Stage of Motherhood.
I had long felt that many of my peers had lives that were somehow a little more perfect, and a little more together than my own. So, I wanted to dig deeper to discover the truth and in turn, learn a little more about myself, and what it meant to be about thirty.
What I discovered was that the beauty of their perfect lives as perfect wives, merely laid on the surface. Things were really somewhat cracked underneath.
My next series, This Stage of Motherhood, likewise was an exploration of what it meant to be a mother. I was considering having a child myself, so I wanted to once again better understand what the experience was like, if only initially, vicariously through my work.
How do you recruit the people you’ve photographed?
For the first two projects they were mostly friends of friends. It actually surprised me how readily people allowed me into their lives.
For the most recent series, Out My Window, a lot of the people in the pictures are my neighbors and friends. And for a couple of the photographs in particular (i.e. 1441 and 1438 Third Avenue) I contacted them through 411.com by looking up the address of a particular building and then writing to the residents in each place, asking them to participate in my project.
Ultimately, I ended up with two pictures of people who lived directly across from each other in different buildings, who everyday get to peer into each other’s home, but who ultimately remain total strangers.
Your work seems quite akin to a lot of the reality shows that are popular on television today.
Yes, but reality TV has actually made it more difficult for me, because they tend to make fun of the people on the shows. So, now people are leery whenever I approach them.
Ironically, it was actually an advertisement for a television show, HBO’s Voyeur, that inspired my latest series. The ad won the grand prix award for outdoor advertising at the 2008 Cannes International Advertising Festival. The campaign featured a four-minute film projected on to the side of a building that allowed "viewers to become voyeurs watching eight different apartments encompassing life, death and everything in between".
It almost seems that through your series of series were watching you (and ourselves) grow up—progressing from someone who wonders what it means to be about thirty to someone who wonders what it is like to have a child…What will you try to learn about next?
Not sure. Maybe, learning how to get a good night’s sleep?
Actually, I’m inspired by Helen Levitt, a renowned street photographer who recently passed away two days ago here in New York City. Like her, I am very interested in documenting how children interact. Except, instead observing how they did so on the streets of New York, I’m interested in how they play on the playground.
The author of the children’s classic, Where The Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak, has this idea that we romanticize childhood. He believes that kids are full of the same emotions that we harbor and deal with as adults. Likewise like he does with literature, through photography I want to explore and understand the little devil inside the child, as well as the little angels that we like to fantasize them all to be.
You’ve lived in DC, Rhode Island, LA and now New York. Any plans to live elsewhere?
I love being in New York and I feel quite at home now. New York City inspires me.
I love it so much that I bought my apartment here in Chelsea. I especially like my view of all the flower shops and the neighborliness of the place.
People often imagine city life to be a lonesome existence; I’ve never felt lonely here. I know every single person in my building.
In sum, I can’t imagine living anywhere else.
*
E. B. White, a NY native and the author of the children’s classic Charlotte's Web once wrote:
...There are roughly three New Yorks...the city of those born here, the city that some commute to and the city of those born elsewhere...
Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last - the city of final destination, the city that is a goal...
Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion.
Much like both Odysseus and Dorothy went on fantastic journeys to discover that there’s no place like home, Gail Albert Halaban has likewise taken us on along on the amazing road to self-discovery through her art.
Moreover, being that her work documents the lives of people in New York and she has decided to raise her children here, I think it is fair to say that Gail is now a true New Yorker.
Welcome home Gail.
Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.
Robert Frost
For more information:
Artists & Photographers Mark Kessell | Curators & Dealers Bonni Benrubi Howard Greenberg |
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