LENSCRATCH - Fine Art Photography Daily

Zackery Hobler: Beneath Two Skies by Amanda SauerJuly 20, 2026

© Zackery Hobler, Beneath Two Skies, front cover

For Zackery Hobler, photography is a means of learning about the external world and how it informs his internal one. Walking and photographing is a practice of searching, with hope, to find moments when the camera – between body and environment – reveals sensibilities often on the periphery of the conscious. He founded the Toronto Photobook Library (2017-2023), working with photographers, publishers, and arts organizations to coordinate reading rooms, artist talks and panels, and roundtable discussions between professionals and amateurs with the aim of fostering sustained engagement with the photobook. As a self-publisher and editor, Hobler has developed a unique approach to photography and the photobook.

Encountering prescribed burning for the first time, Hobler was unsure of what he was looking at or why it was being done. As his interest grew, he developed a relationship with a group of prescribed burn technicians working across southwestern Ontario. Since 2017, he has had the privilege of walking alongside them as they work.

Beneath Two Skies teases out Hobler’s initial reactions to seeing prescribed burning, and embodies the act of looking and moving. Sequences of pictures with similar views evoke subtle movement – a shift in bodyweight, a slight turn of the head – expanding the implication of the physical space. Repetition in the book calls to mind the act of walking a familiar place over and over again, of seeing similar objects or patterns that change gradually every day, and calling the permanence of memory into question. Even the horizon line rises and falls like smoke and fire eddying on turbulent air.

Amanda Sauer: We shared the journey of making a photobook through Penumbra’s LTP program, which allowed me to see the many different edits and iterations of “Beneath Two Skies” that preceded this final version. I thought we could start by speaking a little about this process, the creative journey behind the finished work. Before you had a book, or even a project, you were drawn to a particular subject over and over. What is it about this landscape that captivated you, why did you keep returning?

Zackery Hobler: This landscape is one that is close to me in many ways: it’s where I live, it’s where I work, it’s where I’ve cried, it’s where I’ve celebrated, it’s where I’ve learned to read the land, and where I’ve learned how conservation can and can’t work, it’s where I’ve learned about and seen the effects of colonization and my role in it, it’s where I’ve learned about the loud and quiet fights for sovereignty. It is part of me and that’s why I return to it. So when I walk it, all of that buzzes through my whole body consciously and unconsciously. It reminds me that forms of harmony and stability are possible, but that those states take a lot of work to achieve.

AS: And within this landscape is the element of fire, which is hinted at but doesn’t fully appear until halfway into the book. Fire has many associations, from metaphorical to literal, political to poetic – and it’s visually stunning. Tell us a little about how you see the role of fire in your work, what it means to you as the artist, and how these associations influenced the process of editing and sequencing your photographs.

ZH: I definitely understand the power of fire to function as a symbol in this work. As humans we are always looking for symbols to hang onto in order to provide meaning. As I was working through these pictures, I was struggling to strike a balance between what easily could have been a documentary-style project or photobook on ‘prescribed burns’, and one that reflected the sensibilities I was trying to access in the final edit. And in doing so, I was at odds with all these incredibly dramatic and romantic pictures of flames and smoke. I had to do away with that not only because I thought it would be too heavy-handed, but because it didn’t serve the more phenomenological experience I’m hoping to convey here. It took a lot to get there, but in the book, I defer the spectacle of fire’s presence, to keep it at bay and provide what I feel as closely as possible resembles the initial experience of walking a landscape on fire with uncertainty and little protection aside from my own mind and body.

All that is to say, I’m hoping the fire is seen as an element within the landscape, an aspect of it, rather than a distinct symbol. Because, really, any aspect of this landscape could be construed as a symbol. Like our presence in the landscape, fire wanders through. And that’s part of the reason why I allude to its presence far more than I depict it. I feel that I happened upon this subject matter and it suited the way I think about moving through the world. Just as going through this book, the sequence conveys a walk through a landscape and that landscape happens to be on fire.

AS: I love this idea of fire as a presence wandering through the landscape; it subverts the “grand narrative” that is so ingrained in our culture. Instead, your photographs take us on a walk in a smoldering landscape; they seem to point at the act of visual perception, they give us space to think. But there is tension because there is fire just out of the frame. It’s a careful balance. I know it took a lot of thoughtful refinement to get to this final edit of photographs. Are there photobooks or other artworks that helped you to navigate these choices? What inspirations guided you?

ZH: I appreciate your take on how these pictures work. It’s in line with my intention, which I’m grateful to have reflected back: to allow the act of visual perception to be the primary experience because that’s what this medium is, at the bottom of it all.

In terms of inspiration, I could name so many… there are some pretty obvious ones stemming from the family tree that started with the trunk of Atget, led to Szarkowski, the New Topographics, and things like the photobook explosion of the 2010s. One of the keys for me was Ron Jude’s Lick Creek Line. That book changed my life when I saw it in my early 20s.

Lately, I’ve been keenly interested in photobooks that use grids in some form. Particularly, when those grids toy with our aforementioned act of visual perception. Importantly, I also recently read a book called “On Freedom” by scholar of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder. He recently moved to the University of Toronto from Harvard. His writing is in the poli sci section of the bookstore, but he struck me deeply when he gets to how freedom is directly linked to how we move through the world and how we see ourselves in it. It is real, vital, urgent, and important to acknowledge, embody, and defend that right now.

It ties to Tim Carpenter’s book-length essay on photography, which, in a different way, I also think is vital right now. With Carpenter’s writing, its importance comes in the form of staking a claim on what photography is and how it works from the perspective of a (very gifted) practitioner.

AS: I also share a love of grids! For me there’s something exciting that happens when one imposes an order or structure that allows the images to form relationships without prioritizing one over another. It allows for close observations, to see the small details that might not be noticed in a different presentation. “Beneath Two Skies” employs a linear layout that moves us through the book. Can you share how you came to this format? How do you see it functioning with respect to the photographs and your intentions for how the book is experienced?

ZH: Yes! There’s a book called Heaven by Paul Kooiker where he employs grids wonderfully. In some instances, he circles around objects like churches at a great distance; in others, he lights models with completely different light sources in virtually the same position. It’s a beautiful and utterly photographic experience, very much like you’re talking about.

With my book, the grid structure came as a direct result of this edit I’d made after a conversation with Jenia Fridlyand (your mentor and mine from the LTP program!) that helped me break away from the aforementioned struggle I had early on. The edit went from being this mass of thousands of pictures to nearly what you see in the book within a matter of an afternoon. In that edit, I had arrived at this undulating horizon line that runs throughout the work. And in order to evoke that more fully, there needed to be more than one picture per page in many instances. Simply put: the work demanded it. And that’s cliché for a reason. The whole sense of instability and uncertainty can’t really exist in the same way without it.

AS: There is an undulating horizon line, I hadn’t thought of it that way! The photographs are all taken from eye-level, the first-person perspective, creating this sense of walking. The layout directs the pacing of the walk – where our gaze shifts quickly or lingers, where we stop to take in the landscape or notice small details, and where we look twice, questioning what we are perceiving. There is a hidden text in the book that echoes this relationship between looking and thinking, while primarily describing the weather. The weather, like fire, is often used metaphorically in art. It can be simultaneously internal and external, just as the landscape is both real and space we project onto. This leads me back to the bigger question of why you photograph?

ZH: That’s a big question. I have to nod to a conversation I had with Tim Carpenter a few years ago where I was asking him about how one deals with the futility of trying to describe one’s pictures, which so many photographers acknowledge, and yet a description of our work is always demanded of us. His response was that one’s job as a photographer is to figure out what the subject matter has demanded of them. Now, I recognize that might seem like a vague answer, but, as every other person, my inner world is constantly met by the outer world. So there are times when that inner world is met in relation to something that the camera can make sense of in a way only the picture can describe. So those individual moments become pictures and when that picture gets close to accurately describing that relationship to the world outside my head, that’s a revelation.

And in the way that I work, in sequences, for the most part, there are places and subjects that seem to demand a lot of my inner world. And because the inner world is, for the most part, pre-conscious (unnamed, undescribed, raw information that’s ostensibly disorganized) asking one to describe it is overwhelming and essentially impossible.

So, in short, I’ll point to Robert Adams who says of someone asking him to describe what’s in the pictures: “It’s there in the pictures. Do you want me to say it worse?” I’ll try and say that I’m trying to figure out what’s going on up here in relation to what’s going on out there. And there’s an overwhelming amount of stuff going on in both.

AS: Yes, it’s true that words never truly express what the pictures can, but sometimes we need them in order to lead people to our work. Robert Adams is one of the rare examples of someone who uses both words and pictures eloquently without disrupting the other. You’ve hidden a text (and a tipped in image) in your book. I’m also curious about the title. Can you tell us a little bit about these?

ZH: The text is an oblique attempt at trying to explain the act and feel of looking, which is another way of describing what photography does. I’m not entirely convinced it works, but I took a risk with it. And I chose to hide it because I felt including a descriptive text would imply that the pictures were intended to be illustrative of an idea rather than an experience unto themselves. Hiding the text under the jacket flap felt appropriate because the curious will inevitably find it. And the curious ought to be rewarded.

The tip-in nods to the blooming of forsythia, that to me is emblematic of burn season beginning. Every year, its flowers open when the first burn starts here in southern Ontario, and its blooms are gone by the seasons’ end. It’s a picture that doesn’t necessarily relate directly to the work in the book, but I put it on the cover to remind myself that the signifiers of time passing can be quantified by watching closely the world around us: in this case, the forsythia will always remind me of burn season.

I have to admit: I recently found a better title in a novel by Sheila Heti. But the title I settled on comes from a sensitivity to positionality: we’re always underneath the sky, a sky. But sometimes if you look that way, and then the other way, there are two very different-looking skies. And the sense of being in between one thing and the other really informs how I move through the world.

AS: That’s how it goes sometimes, the clarity comes later, after you’ve been through the whole process and it’s too late to change anything. Maybe the new title will find its way into a future project, you never know…What are you working on next?

ZH: Right now, artistically, I’m working on a new project in Paris. And regarding the burns, I’m still involved with them: I got my wildland firefighting certification, so now I’m one of the technicians who actually conducts the prescribed burns in Southern Ontario. And I’m very happy and grateful to be doing it with the people I learned from and photographed alongside.

AS: That’s fantastic that you are now involved in conducting the prescribed burns, it’s important work. Thanks for sharing your time and thoughts with us!