Nick Verhaeghe
Belgium
Artist's contact
limited edition
Nick Verhaeghe
Nick Verhaeghe’s work offers a poetic meditation on the essence of photography: not as documentation, but as transformation. His images—grainy, fragile, and elusive—seem to hover between presence and absence. In the series Portals of Displacement: Cluster, Verhaeghe recovers years of 'lost' negatives, initially set aside, and reconsiders them as raw material. Developed through handmade plant-based chemistry, these photographs embody a visual dialogue between nature and process, accident and intention.
What links these images is not subject matter but rhythm—repeating shapes, recurring gestures, echoes of form. There are bodies and plants, stains and shadows, mirrors and voids. Yet nothing asserts itself too strongly; the images remain open, porous. Their abstraction resists literal reading, and in doing so, allows the viewer space to project, to imagine, to play.
Verhaeghe’s practice has the quiet persistence of a natural cycle. By rejecting perfection and control, he lets the world seep into his work—light, time, dust, decay. The result is a photographic language that feels ancient and experimental at once: as if the medium were rediscovered from the ground up.
This is photography in its most essential form—not just a way of seeing, but a way of being with the world, attentive to its fragility, its rhythms, and its infinite potential for transformation.
Vanessa Rusci,
curator of the magazine
Project
Portals of Displacement: Cluster
This ongoing body of work is a collection of "lost negatives"—images made between 2016 and 2022 that didn’t fit into any prior series but carried a persistent visual and emotional resonance. All were developed with plant-based chemistry, creating a dialogue between image, process, and organic matter. Rather than offering a fixed narrative, the artist presents the work as a visual archive—an open constellation of forms and moods. Circles, body shapes, shadows, and abstract marks repeat across the images, inviting viewers to form their own connections and meanings. For Verhaeghe, this is just the beginning: each image holds the potential for further transformation through techniques like anthotypes, gum prints, or photogravure.
Artist statement
Nick Verhaeghe’s work revolves around a fascination with the photographic medium in its raw, alchemical state. For him, photography is not just a tool to record reality, but a living process shaped by light, chemistry, and the unpredictability of nature. He often creates his own developing solutions using plants and household substances, embracing the beauty of imperfection, chance, and decay. This approach turns the act of making an image into a kind of ritual—a conversation between the artist, materials, and environment. He sees his work as a catalogue of light: intimate, imperfect, and open-ended.