The future lies behind us; Gail Albert Halaban’s “Out My Window” project is as conceptual as contemporary arts projects are (alas) expected to be, but its modus operandi takes up practices from the early days of photography. In the 19th century, Julia Margaret Cameron, Henry Peach Robinson, Oscar Gustave Rejlander and other photographers set up elaborate tableaux vivants as their subjects. Ms. Halaban (b. 1970) also stage-manages tableaux vivants; she arranges her subjects in the windows of one building so they can be photographed from the window of a building across the way. She has been doing this for over a decade and on several continents, publishing and exhibiting the pictures from individual cities, but the George Eastman Museum show is the first time her work from multiple cities can be seen together and compared.
