The eye is a sphere with an average diameter of 2.3 centimetres. It is made of relatively soft matter and quite fragile. Minor damage can lead to vision loss. Eyes sit in bony cavities at the front of the skull. Eyelids and eyelashes provide further protection.
We do not have the full picture
We blink our eyes about 20,000 times a day. The fact seems so self-evident that we hardly give it a second thought, let alone realize the limitations of our vision.
French writer Georges Perec summarizes it perfectly in his celebrated book
Species of Spaces (1974): "We use our eyes for seeing. Our field of vision reveals a limited space, something vaguely circular, which ends very quickly to left and right, and doesn't extend very far up or down. If we squint, we can manage to see the end of our nose; if we raise our eyes, we can see there's an up, if we lower them, we can see there's a down. If we turn our head in one direction, then in another, we don't even manage to see completely everything there is around us; we have to twist our bodies round to see properly what was behind."
No one could be more aware of this physiological truth than Bruges-born artist Ria Verhaeghe. Before motherhood and the germination of her artistic practice, she was employed in the optometry department of one of Bruges' eye clinics. Here, she recorded her patients' visual fields, more specifically by measuring the individual photosensitivity of their retinas. She performed slit lamp examinations.
The results helped diagnose visual field loss, an indicator of glaucoma, optic nerve disorders, neurological abnormalities or a detached retina, among other things. "I use this experience as a way of seeing," says Ria Verhaeghe. "We don't see very much at all (laughs). What we perceive is nothing compared to what we don't. We do not have the full picture. Some people have a broad field of vision, others a small one, but everyone has a blind spot. You can sense it if you press gently on your eyes and look at your nose. It's very strange. You never see what's happening in your blind spot."
Why are we blind to the suffering of others?
By Barbara De Coninck
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.
