Gail Albert Halaban

Albert-Halaban's photographic series About Thirty examines the life of privileged women in New York City and Los Angeles. These scenes of mothers with their nannies or a group of women comparing engagement rings establish both a critique of this kind of lifestyle as well as what the artist calls her own "complicated desire" to be part of this world.[3]

Albert-Halaban's series Hopper Redux revisits the exact locations in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where Edward Hopper painted. The photographs elicit an uncanny familiarity. They echo Hopper's paintings, but they are decidedly photographic and of the present day. In this sense they seem to oscillate between the historical past and the contemporary present.

Albert-Halaban's ongoing series Out My Window consists of elaborately staged photographs of people in their homes, shot from a distance. The architecture of New York City apartment buildings features prominently in the pictures, but the focus is the intimate view of their inhabitants.[4]

Albert-Halaban's series Out My Window, Paris picks up where its namesake leaves off. Set in Paris, Albert-Halaban peers through and photographs what’s behind the windows in the French city’s apartments and courtyards. As with "Out My Window" the residents are knowingly photographed, as if actors on the film set. A set of the Paris photographs first appeared in the French publication Le Monde in November 2012.[5]

Albert-Halaban has published a book called Italian Views with the Aperture Foundation, in which she has photographed from window to neighboring window in cities throughout that nation and collected stories of what neighbors imagine when they look to their neighbor's windows.

She has photographed in countries around the globe including South Korea, Turkey, Portugal, Canada, Argentina, France, and Israel both by traveling to those countries and by using remote technology to photograph from her studio in New York City.

Albert-Halaban's work has appeared in The New York Times, New York, Time, M, World Magazine, Slate, and The Huffington Post. Her fine art photography has been internationally exhibited.[6]

Albert-Halaban was a New York Foundation for the Arts fellow in 2019.

Albert-Halaban's work is in public and private collections including the Hermes Foundation, George Eastman Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, Nelson Atkins Museum, Getty Museum, Cape Ann Museum, Wichita Art Museum hold her work. She teaches in the Medical Humanities Department at Columbia University.

Albert-Halaban teaches in the Narrative Medicine Department at Columbia University where she supports and teaches art-making on the medical campus by both students and faculty. Her program teaches observation and empathy. Research shows that education in the humanities improves doctors' performance.

Inspired by her Out My Window photograph series, Sheila Callaghan and Marcus Gardley composed a one-act play Grace & Milt, dramatizing what might happen when neighbors who have never met connect through their windows. Its debut performance, starring Adam O'Byrne and Zoe Winters, took place in April 2019 at Aperture Gallery in New York City.