There are times in our lives when serendipity accelerates events and the exceptional can occur. In September last year I sat next to the acclaimed designer Guy Oliver, who was the guest of a mutual friend, at a lunch in Malaysia. He told me about an artist who had created a grand experiment, taking one million photographs in two years. What is more remarkable than this unprecedented feat is that the photographs were taken, and continue to be taken, from a single window.

I remember my first meeting with the son of the Korean artist Ahae during the 2012 Louvre exhibition inauguration in the Jardin des Tuileries, at the invitation of Henri Loyrette. Mr. Yoo used simple words, filled with admiration, to describe his father’s unique work. He spoke about his own mission to reveal that work to people today who—caught up in the frenzy of modern-day life—do not have the time to stop and discover the world from a single window.
“Extraordinary in the ordinary,” Henri Loyrette said with the acuity of language that over the past twelve years has accompanied the strength of his choices made at the helm of the Louvre Museum.

To look out your own window, opening your eyes to something beyond those four walls towards the world that is beyond you and beyond what seems to be reality: this is the theme which, since the camera was invented, has accompanied it and determined how it is used. The visual medium that allows us to multiply to infinity the perspective of what we know.
The first photography in history, taken between 1826 and 1827 by Nicéphore Nièpce, is a

This immensely simple, but at the same time enormously rich view of the world through a single window of the house of the Korean photographer, inventor and entrepreneur Ahae has quite overwhelmed me.
I am relatively well acquainted with contemporary photography, which has almost given up on any observation of the world and, for the most part, concentrates on carefully arranged or carefully selected and highly sophisticated “social motifs” which interpret the

Ahae’s works appear as a unique vision of the natural basis of human existence. His photographs would seem to provide the evidence: a forest, fields and meadows. But what actually unfolds before our eyes is a sort of metaphor for man’s ideal ecological environment.
There exist various levels of depiction. On an aesthetic level, he incessantly develops

1816. Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, Le Gras Estate, France. After eight days of stealthily waiting at his window, Nicéphore Niépce obtains the first heliographic image drawn by sunlight. He relates: “I put the camera in the room where I was working. In front of the bird cage, with the window wide open, I carried out the experiment following the process that you know, my dear friend; and on the white paper I saw the entire part of the cage which could be seen from the window and a faint image of the windowpanes, which were less lit than the objects outside.”[1] Ten years later, on a pewter plate coated with bitumen, he created his View from the Window at Le Gras, the oldest preserved photo known today.