The Lives of Perfect Strangers
Both of my kids are obsessed with Rachel Cole and Blanca Gómez’s book, City Moon. In the early readings, their joy stems from the hide-and-seek game with the moon as a mother and son go on an evening walk in the city. By the twentieth read, their interest branches out to the sidewalks, shops, and windows offering a peek into evening routines - someone playing the trumpet, a couple hugging, another neighbor cooking. Every subsequent read leads to more elaborate stories about each character as they morph from background noise to familiar faces we excitedly flip the page to see again.
Daydreaming about lives lived in her own city is what led photographer, Gail Albert Halaban to start her series “Out My Window”. Halaban captures scenes of daily life that are both anonymous and intimate, set in the landscape of the city. Her compositions play with light and color - warm, inviting interiors balanced with a cool glow of the city around. The architecture is just as much the focus as the people. The table setting, clothes, skyline, building details, are little cues of people’s lives, cultures, and rituals that can almost feel like a puzzle to solve.
Halaban started the project in 2005 when her daughter turned one and her neighbors across the street, whom she had never met, dropped of a card wishing her a happy first birthday. That experience led her to consider the opportunity to connect people who are already part of each other’s daily lives, but have never met before.
For each image in her series, a participant reaches out to their neighbor about the photograph - allowing for them to meet and connect, despite the art. Starting in NYC, her project quickly expanded globally and in 2020, Halaban virtually collaborated with neighbors in Russia, India, Pakistan, Japan, Boston, Italy, Portugal, Germany, Poland, Israel, and more. To coordinate these shoots, especially during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Halaban worked with local photographers to help set up the camera in the window, tether it to their computer, and share their screen with her. “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.
A little curiosity is maybe all it takes to fall in love with the lives of perfect strangers around us.
Top image from City Moon by Rachael Cole and illustrated by Blanca Gómez Image courtesy Penguin Random House