# 3
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. Image alteration: none.
This is an original photographic image extracted from my series called Please do not show my face. It is a collection of photographs divided into six chapters. All images have been shot in Calais and Dunkerque migration camps, across the cities and in the so-called jungles. Please do not show my face is not a documentary series on migration or migrants (but no one can control how images can collect arguments)—this work aims mainly to be an essay on the concept of the gaze. In using documentary photography materials, it interrogates the boundaries of visibility, authorship, and power of representation.
In the chapter devoted to thresholds, each image probes the notion of a threshold as a political act for those possessing the means of representation, compelling us to ask how far we can—or should—go in portraying others. Simultaneously, migration—moving from one place, status, or idea to another—is inextricably linked to thresholds and is never neutral: having, or being denied, the power to cross them determines who can move freely and who remains excluded.
Invitations to contemplate
This image is part of the collection
Keep exploring
- We would ask to transform and reform the modalities of membership by which the city (cité) belongs to the state, as in a developing Europe or in international juridical structures still dominated by the inviolable rule of state sovereignty […] This should no longer be the ultimate horizon for citie …
why did I collect this image
The photograph visually references a layering of matter, mirroring the complexity of both the visible and the act of representation. It witnesses the ruins of a spectral presence. And who is present. Are we? Are they?
By weaving elements of documentary practice with a refusal (ethical, technical) of total disclosure, the image reveals how our efforts to look, to understand, and to testify form a network of meaning that cannot be reduced to a single perspective. In this tension between opacity and clarity, the photographs challenge our assumptions about the ethical limits of speaking on someone else’s behalf. And what language do we speak?
How do we look at things? Who holds the power to frame, archive, and interpret a world that might not be their own?
of our Imagination
