Since 2017, photographer Zackery Hobler has been documenting and walking alongside prescribed burn technicians working across southwestern Ontario.

In this talk at the City of Toronto Archives, Hobler will present images from his first photobook, Beneath Two Skies, contextualized by archival records and staff involved with the City’s Traditional & Prescribed Burn program.

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. As a self-publisher and editor, Hobler has developed a unique approach to photography and the photobook. His first monograph unifies the understanding that comes from working as a prescribed burn technician with the naïvety of his first walks through burn blocks, of uncertainly walking through wild space on fire.

As founder of the Toronto Photobook Library (2017-2023), Hobler worked 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.

Hobler has self-published several books and photo-based books, including Pamphlet, a submission-based zine showcasing photographs and text he sequenced together as editor & publisher in order to explore the potential for proximity between each medium to open new meanings and experiences.