Interview

Dec 19

Zackery Hobler

Zackery Hobler is a photographer living in Toronto, Ontario. Growing up in southwestern Ontario, he moved house a lot; until his thirties, three years was the longest he ever lived in the same place, and even in those short stints, particularly in his earliest years, every three days he moved back-and-forth between one house and the other. For him, the constant moving from one point to another was the only constant. This sense of his past informs his practice. The way in which Zackery photographs is informed by movement and reflection; for him, making photographs is a means of teaching himself about the outer world and how it informs his inner world, and vice versa.

Walking and photographing is a process of searching with the hope of revealing sensibilities, of finding points in the physical world where the self is mirrored and provides hope in recognition. In those moments when the shutter is released, he is afforded the ability to reflect on his reactions. And when the pictures accurately reveal the feeling, that internal state of recognition, a process of drawing a circle around that feeling begins.

The movements of the moon, prescribed burning, and interstitial locales have all been the subject matter in which Zackery has found a means of connecting points where his sense of certainty frays. In his most recent body of work, titled Beneath Two Skies, Zackery evokes literal movement through space and the physical act of looking as the theme of his photobook. Set in oak woodland and savannah of southern Ontario, the viewer moves through a landscape, which is revealed to be on fire. Using the horizon as an element of formal structure, it rises and falls and tilts throughout the book, giving the landscape a fluid aspect.

As the book inhabits the viewer’s movement through space, the fire’s presence becomes more obviously permeating and one’s certainty about the state of the landscape itself is called into question. Throughout 2023, Zackery was a mentee of The Photobook: Long Term Program, a mentorship with photographer Jenia Fridlyand, run in collaboration between Image Threads and the Penumbra Foundation based in New York City. In May of 2023, he had a solo exhibition at the CICA Museum in South Korea. Since 2015, he has exhibited at galleries in Canada and the U.S.A. In 2019 and 2020, with early iterations of Beneath Two Skies, he was long-listed for the New Generation Photography Award through the National Gallery of Canada. As a founder of the project Toronto Photobook Library (2017-2022), Zackery worked with photographers, publishers, and organizations from Canada and abroad to create programming which materializes in temporary reading rooms and artist talks, supplemented by themed collections of curated photobooks. TPbL fosters hands-on engagement with the medium in Toronto.

What is your background and how did you start your journey in the art world?

“It no longer exists, but the photography undergrad I attended was very commercially-oriented. When I started, it was only two years long, and very technically-focused. Upon graduating, I felt that there had to be more to making photographs than just solving problems for advertisers and earning money. The college briefly offered a two-and-a-half-year degree bridging program, still commercially-oriented, but there were classes that provided insight into processes of working with and thinking with photography. There, I was introduced to theory, history, long-form projects, and, most importantly, the photobook.
Learning about the photobook as a medium opened me up to what I’m doing now. One of my instructors showed me Ron Jude’s Lick Creek Line while we were talking about an assignment. I saw, for the first time, pictures that evoked something totally outside of my previous understanding of how photography can function. Here was a book that contained virtually no text, no introductory essay on how to think about the photographs, but in every detail of its form, the photographs did all this work on me: taking me from this opening of intense noise to a completely isolating quiet. And in that quiet, a trapper is revealed. And as he does his work, the photographer is doing his own version of that same work: trapping. I was guided through a photographic space that I could not explain verbally, but whose experience I recognized immediately. And I was forever changed. All of this was done with 71 pictures and only three words. After that, I spent a good share of the money from my student loans on photobooks at a shop here in Toronto called Working Title, which also no longer exists.”

What inspires you?

“Moments when I find myself completely open to what’s in front of me, to the point of being utterly vulnerable, are points of inspiration for me. Seeing the white oaks on the Rice Lake Plains for the first time, laying on a mountaintop in the Ruby Range in the Yukon on Champagne-Aishihik territory, or walking through the community vegetable gardens of St. Cloud in Paris have all been moments where I’ve been filled with an indescribable and overwhelming feeling that have compelled me to stop and just be there. Often in those moments, I’m not driven to photograph because I know what’s occurring is internal. But the memory of that feeling, once it’s ebbed slightly, leaves something in mind that I can try to draw a circle around with my photographs in some way or another. This feeling isn’t just exclusive to landscapes; it can happen in conversation, in front of paintings, while reading, while walking with friends, while looking at Michael Schmidt’s Berlin Nach 45 for the first time. Louise Glück wrote ‘I read to feel addressed: the complement, I suppose, of speaking in order to be heeded.’ I imagine most people make art for reasons that rhyme with what Glück’s saying.”

What themes do you pursue? Is there an underlying message in your work?

“If we’re talking about themes in terms of subject matter, there are a lot of natural landscapes in the work I’ve put out into the world so far. But that’s not all I photograph. One of the things I try to resist in making work - that is, in working toward a finished book or an exhibition - is having an underlying message. There isn’t a secret agenda! Ideally, the work is a cumulative experience that is, first and foremost, a sequence of photographs. The hope is that the arrangements in the photographs and of the photographs evoke something deeper, hopefully getting close to a sensibility that got me walking around and photographing in the first place. Whatever that may be needs to be sorted out in the process of photographing and carried through the editing process.
Before I started really reading about it, a good friend of mine explained to someone that my work is phenomenological in nature. I found that to be a helpful label. And the more I read on the subject, the more I understand that term and the numerous ways in which it could be interpreted. That being said, my aim isn’t to make work about that, it’s just a means of intellectualizing work I was making intuitively in the first place.”

How would you describe your work?

“My first photobook, which I’m nearly finished, is a walk through Southern Ontario oak woodlands and savannahs that are gradually revealed to be on fire. The ‘event’ isn’t the fire, it’s the movement of a body through space. Fire is an element of the photographs the way grass is an element of the photographs, and by extension, they are elements of the space depicted. Tying back to the previous question, I’m looking for ways in which a photograph, and a sequence of photographs, can get close to describing the highly subjective experience of moving through the world. So right now, that’s happening through repetition, formal through-lines, and sticking with one environment as subject matter around which all of this revolves. A friend of mine once told me that I make really beautiful pictures in really bad lighting conditions. I won’t speak to the quality of my pictures, but I do agree that I often choose bad lighting conditions. I’ve yet to really pin down a good reason for that.”

Which artists influence you most?

“In elementary school, I failed reading comprehension. In college, I almost didn’t get my degree because I enrolled in too many literature classes. Somewhere in between those two points, reading became a deep well of inspiration for me. There’s never enough time to read. Mary Oliver, Louise Glück, George Saunders, and Wisława Szymborska have been helpful navigators recently. Last year, I started photographing in a Parisian park because I wanted to follow in Eugène Atget’s footsteps and nod to the work he made there, some of my favourite pictures of all time. I knew it’d be impossible to do what he did, but when I got there, I was even more stunned by his pictures and the way his intuition (about framing, light, technical considerations) coalesced into this little rectangle that conveyed these spaces in front of my eyes so concisely that I all but cowered as I tried to release the shutter on my camera. If anyone was around me there in the rain, they’d have heard me frustratedly wondering aloud: How’d he do that?!
His subject matter in the park is off the table for me now, because it was, and continues to be, one of the most humbling and baffling experiences standing where he stood, trying to comprehend just how he did what he did. All that is to say: Atget’s influence echoes through much of the photography I concern myself with.
When I was in Malta visiting a dear friend, I had the privilege of seeing a digital dummy of Jenia Fridlyand’s newest photobook-in-progress, and that work sticks in my mind like a splinter.”

“The hope is that the arrangements in the photographs and of the photographs evoke something deeper, hopefully getting close to a sensibility that got me walking around and photographing in the first place.”

What is your creative process like?

“I photograph a lot and often, but my creative process is very slow. There are times when I don’t look at my negatives for 6 months after I expose them. I’ll print contact sheets and put them on the wall and let them stay up there for months until they start to become like wallpaper. I stop noticing them. And then I start to look again. Once the novelty I feel for them wears off, I can start to look at them with an appropriate amount of disinterestedness that allows me to see what’s actually there. I’m a pretty emotionally-driven person and I have a tendency toward being romantic, so when I make photographs, I’m responding to a feeling, one that can often be totally overwhelming. And I’ll return to a place or certain subject matter in order to try to find the way of conveying that feeling. But because photographs, at least in the way that I understand and want to use them, are the closest medium we have to depicting being in the real, tangible, visible world, I want them to function primarily in that way, and then they can function as a means of evoking a connection between the internal and external after that. In order to start getting close to that, I need to be hit with that overwhelming feeling and then I need time.”

What is an artist’s role in society and how do you see that evolving?

“That’s a challenge because a definitive answer in my mind is pretty elusive. The idea of an artist is so subjective that it verges on meaninglessness. A songwriter from the northwestern United States said something along the lines of: All I do is stand on the ground, pointing at things, basically. I think that gets close. The means in which you do that pointing and how many people pay attention and agree with what and how you do that pointing give you more clout, or gravitas, or whatever. It’s almost child-like though, isn’t it? In tandem with that Louise Glück quote, in the simplest terms, I think an artist’s role is being poised to point something out and say, ‘Do you feel that too?’ hoping not just for acknowledgement of the question, but a yes.”