Provisoria

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 imagesoften dramatic, ambiguous, or unsettlingexplore 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 sectionsHuman Interest, Fusion and Mindwavesoffer insight into the archives 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 Trmmerfrauen) contains images and notes focused on human emotion, empathy, and compassion. This book presents a curated selection of over 3,500 imagesa glimpse into a vast and richly layered archive that reimagines how we see, sort, and understand the photographic world. The project is supported by Be-Part, Platform for Contemporary Art in Waregem and Kortrijk.