# 5
Every image in the Alterlibrary collection is intended as a quote, an excerpt of a larger discourse. But every image also stands as a matter that could undergo a series of operations and alterations. Therefore, images are renewable sources.
Operations: Extraction and Collection. First, it was taken out of its original digital context and collections (the magazine and broader web) and placed into this particular archive via the technical operation of screenshot—effectively shifting its belonging from one public space to another.
Image alteration: manipulation in Photoshop:
A partial selection was made, isolating only part of the visible scene and thus altering the substance of the original image.
After “cutting out” this portion, a blank area remained on the canvas. That void was automatically filled using Photoshop’s AI-driven tool, which sampled the remaining visible elements to generate a new patch of imagery following a similar pattern.
Halftone Conversion: Finally, the modified image was transformed into a halftone layer—a print-inspired technique that uses a grid of small, varying dots to simulate continuous tones. Historically, halftone processes were crucial in newspaper and magazine production, enabling photographs to be reproduced using a pattern of ink dots rather than solid blocks of color or grayscale.
Remains and fragments, points of a lecture, pieces of reality, amounts of appearance: whenever we read an image, are we free to investigate its possible meaning and its relationship to a given reality? Things from a distance may appear differently.
This photograph, sourced from an online Italian magazine called Doppiozero, has been easily downloaded from the website and added to the collection Opacity of Images. Its original function was to illustrate an article about the death of migrants navigating the Mediterranean sea, but it remained uncredited and undescribed.
Invitations to contemplate
This image is part of the collection
Keep exploring
What if we see differently?
Opacity of Images explores how photographs that might appear straightforward carry multiple layers of interpretation. Is waste always just waste? This piece, radically reshaped by extraction, partial selection, generative filling, and halftone conversion, epitomizes the tension between clarity and obscurity. The halftone dots—once employed to standardize images in print—now become a metaphor for the pixelation of meaning: as each layer reframes the image, its reference to “reality” grows more elusive.
of our Imagination
