[Winter 2026]
David Hlynsky, A Focusing Appliance
by Kenneth Hayes
Toronto, Impulse[b:], 2025, 203 pages
[EXCERPT]
David Hlynsky’s new book, A Focusing Appliance, has a distinctive tone that would conventionally see it labelled a meditation on photography, but it might be more accurately described as a rumination on photography, with the caveat that this term applies better in its older, animal meaning of processing material by iterative digestion than in the more common contemporary sense of obsessively dwelling on psychopathologies – although there is plenty of that in the text, too. The impression that Hlynsky’s process resembles nutrition extracted over time is given in part by the fact that, as a thinker, he is quite un-, or even, anti-systematic. He draws largely upon experiences gained as a working photographer, teacher, and family man, and his general approach is anecdotal, which is reflected in the book’s numerous short chapters. Although his historical account of photography observes a roughly chronological order, it is both highly digressive and quite speculative. Accounts of the invention of photography weave back and forth, and sometimes bits are reiterated to no obvious end. Clearly, he has not aspired to produce a history of photography – impossible, in any case, in a book without an academic apparatus – nor even a theory of photography as such, which would require a more orderly, more comprehensive treatment.
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[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 131 – Collecting ]
[ Complete article in digital version available here: A Focusing Appliance]
Kenneth Hayes is a retired architectural historian who lives in Sudbury, Ontario. He occasionally writes contemporary art criticism, with a particular focus on photography. He is the author of Milk and Melancholy (MIT Press and Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art, 2008), a book about images of milk splashes in photo-conceptual art from 1965 to 1985.