Lectures – Ciel variable Magazine

David Hlynsky, A Focusing Appliance – Kenneth Hayes

Ciel variable 131 – COLLECTING | Lectures, Readings
Authors: Kenneth Hayes | Artists: David Hlynsky

For this book alternating images, reflections, and anecdotes, David Hlynsky drew on his lived experience as a photographer, teacher, and father. Neither annals nor a theoretical essay, “the book reads as notes on a life-long captivation by photography . . . [The images] feature much careful observation and a quick visual wit” writes Kenneth Hayes. He invokes a wide range of authors, from Marshall McLuhan to Jonathan Crary, including Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag, to explain Hlynsky’s “postmodern, quirky, and highly self-conscious” work.

Sandra Brewster, Blur – Sofia Belmenouar

Ciel variable 131 – COLLECTING | Lectures, Readings
Authors: Sofia Belmenouar | Artists: Sandra Brewster

First presented as an exhibition, Sandra Brewster’s Blur brings out, in book form, the tactile and shifting dimension of the images. “As if it were a flipbook – the portraits begin to dance in my hands” writes Safia Belmenouar. This also reactivates “the very core of Brewster’s approach: to capture identity through its movement, its constitutive instability.” Marked by printing accidents and a lack of sharpness, the work as a whole presents itself as an act of resistance against representations imposed by colonial history.

Michel-Hardy Vallée, Premières planches. Photos de John Max – Fanny Bieth

Ciel variable 131 – COLLECTING | Lectures, Readings
Authors: Fanny Bieth | Artists: Michel-Hardy Vallée

This volume devoted to the formative years of photographer John Max, “as his professional status grew” is based on the discovery of previously unseen images that remained at the contact-sheet stage. Beyond offering a return to the 1950s and 1960s, Premières planches pays tribute to work done quietly, sheltered from view. “They reveal the swarm of experience behind the apparent coherence – before the selection and refinement – inscribing images, people, and illustrious moments in the shared continuum made of micro-narratives and multiple social groups,” comments Fanny Bieth.

Guy Delisle, Pour une fraction de seconde – Michel Hardy-Vallée

Ciel variable 130 - PLANTS AND GARDENS | Lectures, Readings
Authors: Michel Hardy-Vallée | Artists: Guy Delisle

[Fall 2025] Pour une fraction de seconde by Michel Hardy-Vallée Paris, Delcourt, 2024, 202 pages [EXCERPT] For a work to be called a photograph, it must contain at least one image. Add a second one and you have a comic strip. And with a third, you have a film if you make them scroll by […]