Although the world right now is in many ways isolated and divided, photographer Gail Albert Halaban finds hope in small moments of neighborly compassion. Through her ongoing, fifteen-year-long project, Out My Window, Albert Halaban fosters relationships around the world by photographing what neighbors see through their neighbors’ windows. “We’re feeling very disconnected right now, and if we just look at our neighbors and have relationships across the window space, it takes us out of these bubbles we’ve created for ourselves, and we realize that our neighbors’ lives aren’t that different than our own,” the artist told BBC in a July 2020 interview. While the series initially began in New York, technology has opened up the possibility to collaborate remotely with neighbors near and far. This process has been especially valuable since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has resulted in unprecedented circumstances of isolation around the world. “Even if I cannot travel, I can have another photographer in a different city set up a camera in their window, tether it to their computer, and share the screen. At the same time, I direct the shoot from my home in New York City,” said Albert Halaban. In 2020, as part of Out My Window, Global, an extension of her earlier series, the artist virtually collaborated with neighbors in Russia, India, Pakistan, Japan, Boston, Italy, Portugal, Germany, Poland, and Israel, to name a few.
