Issue 16: Zackery Hobler: Impermanence and the Photobook

Interview

THE BURNING PHOTOGRAPH

A Conversation with Zackery Hobler

The Photobook as Community
Our conversation began with the Toronto Photobook Library, which Hobbler ran from 2017 to 2023. What started as a casual idea of sharing his own collection with friends quickly grew into a collaboration with Toronto’s Contact Festival. The library hosted reading rooms, panels, and talks, but its essence was always the same: a place where people could sit with photobooks without the pressure to buy them. For Hobbler, it was about cultivating a community of looking, a library without lending, and resisting the idea that such encounters could simply migrate online.

Beneath Two Skies
From this collective project we turned to Beneath Two Skies, Hobbler’s long-term exploration of prescribed burns across Ontario. For nearly a decade he photographed the fragile, unsettling landscapes of controlled fire. The resulting book is not a collection of dramatic flames but a meditation on instability and perception—tilting horizons, flickers of orange in the green, an atmosphere of fragility and renewal. As Hobbler explained:

The structure of the book follows this principle. What begins as an apparently straightforward study of woodland gradually reveals the presence of fire, not as spectacle but as a quiet force running through the sequence.

Segments and Leaves Laying About
If Beneath Two Skies immerses us in atmosphere, Segments and Leaves Laying About works by reduction. Built around a single image, repeated and altered by translucent overlays and small drawings, it culminates in burned holes piercing the pages. The book becomes a material experiment, dismantling the photograph within the form of the book itself. Fire returns here not as subject but as mark, a physical trace that destabilizes the image.

Narrative Possibilities
Taken together, the two projects reveal Hobbler’s view of the photobook as a narrative device. He resists straightforward comparisons with literature, insisting that photography works on a different register, but acknowledges that sequencing can carry its own kind of narrative: associative, rhythmic, and sometimes revelatory.

For Hobbler, this is the essence of photographic process: long stretches of uncertainty punctuated by revelation. The book becomes the form that holds this movement—between not knowing and sudden recognition.

Looking Ahead
Our conversation ended with his current work in Paris. Photographing in rain-soaked parks, Hobbler finds himself drawn to the contrast between miserable conditions and the joy of making images. In this pursuit he has also found himself tracing the footsteps of a key figure in photography’s history:

This blend of continuity and difference—between Atget’s Paris and his own, between discomfort and delight—marks the direction of Hobbler’s current practice. As with fire, form, and revelation, it is less about a subject than about the pursuit of a feeling, one that only the photobook can finally give shape to.