Provisoria - Ria Verhaeghe

Provisoria is an alternative image archive curated by Ria Verhaeghe since the early 1990s, sourced from international newspapers. Organized by keywords, dates, and thematic groupings, the archive is an effort to explore a different dimension of photojournalism. The images—often dramatic, ambiguous, or unsettling—explore the raw and layered emotional dimensions of photojournalism. With over 60,000 images, the collection spans from the striking and dramatic to the ambiguous, grotesque, and unexpectedly tender. Three sections—Human Interest, Fusion and Mindwaves—offer insight into the archive’s conceptual range.

Fusion explores how we interpret images, grouping photographs by visual or symbolic qualities: featuring categories like shadows (simulacre), icons (icon), double images (glende), traces (trace), as well as those that are surreal (alien), aesthetically compelling (beauty), or energetically charged (move or MUD, for “multi-use dimension”). Mindwaves, by contrast, is structured around formal visual qualities: packaging (emballage), texture (such as Fourche, Circle, Amorf, or Geometric), and connection (connection, including subcategories like Human, Realea, and Strip). The Human Interest section (Icarus, Verticals , WWEB and Trümmerfrauen) contains images and notes focused on human emotion, empathy, and compassion.

This book presents a curated selection of over 3,500 images—a glimpse into a vast and richly layered archive that reimagines how we see, sort, and understand the photographic world.