Gail Albert Halaban: Out My Window, Chelsea Family Dinner, 2011

“I’ve been spying on my neighbors. It’s gone on for decades. The Manhattan apartment where I grew up faces hundreds of windows, each providing its own show, in a vast array whose delights grew up around me. As a child, in the nights leading up to Christmas, I would spend hours looking into windows, counting how many were decorated with lights. When I got older, I’d scan the same windowscape for distant figures in states of undress. Through the 1970s and 1980s, we marked Passover by gazing out our dining-room window to another family’s Seder, across the way and a few floors down. Year after year, the family was there, its home gleaming with candles and good silver, a constant part of our sacred tradition. We never knew their names or exchanged a word with them. Yet what we surely knew, but never talked about, was that they and our other window-neighbors were watching us, too. However, to acknowledge the gaze would be mortifying. Even now, I have a hard time admitting having watched.”—Gail Albert Halaban

This photograph comes from Halaban’s series Out My Window, a beautiful collection of photographs acknowledging the unspoken voyeurism by New York City inhabitants.