In Beneath Two Skies, Canadian photographer Zackery Hobler presents a visually meditative and conceptually layered investigation into the phenomenon of prescribed burning—a controlled ecological intervention that paradoxically destroys in order to preserve. From his first encounter with the practice, marked by disorientation and doubt, Hobler crafts a project that channels this initial uncertainty into a photographic language steeped in repetition, movement, and a subtle choreography of light and form. The resulting body of work—published as a photobook—becomes both document and ritual, exploring how landscape, memory, and perception coalesce through fire and its aftermath.

In this sense, Beneath Two Skies can also be read as an ode to one of the most enduring myths across human civilizations: fire as both gift and curse. Among the most powerful symbols in the history of religions and myths, fire has often been tied to divine power, creation, and transformation. In Greek mythology, the Titan Prometheus defied the gods by stealing fire from Mount Olympus to give it to humankind—an act that empowered humanity with knowledge, warmth, and survival, but one that also drew the wrath of Zeus. Hobler’s work, though grounded in contemporary environmental practice, resonates with this ancient symbolism. The fire in his photographs is one that reshapes both land and consciousness, carrying within it the potential for rebirth as well as for loss.

At the heart of Beneath Two Skies is a performative structure that mirrors the seasonal cycles of the land it depicts. Hobler’s use of photographic sequences—with repeated viewpoints and motifs—recreates the sensation of walking the same terrain day after day, season after season. This rhythm evokes not just the passage of time but a kind of musicality: images rise and fall, drift and return, as though following the undulating tempo of a slow, solemn composition.

The cyclical nature of the work speaks directly to the transformative power of fire and the temporality of land. In prescribed burning, destruction is intentional; regeneration is its consequence. Hobler resists the urge to foreground fire as a dramatic spectacle; instead, he withholds it from view until it emerges slowly, almost imperceptibly, through the sequence. When it does appear, it is less an event than a presence—a latent force whose visibility is contingent upon time and attention. This decision grants fire a kind of agency, allowing it to “reveal itself on its own terms,” as Hobler writes. It is an aesthetic gesture that imbues the landscape with mystery and reminds the viewer that the land we see is never the whole story.

This withholding is also what aligns Beneath Two Skies with the themes of memory and perception. The land, once burned, no longer looks the same. The familiar is rendered strange; what we remember of a place is rewritten by fire. Yet in this loss, there is also possibility. The fire clears space for new growth, new images, new understandings. Hobler's project becomes a visual metaphor for the instability of memory itself: each photograph suggests not only what once was, but what might return—altered. The viewer is thus asked to reconsider the ways we perceive and remember place—not as fixed images in the mind, but as mutable, temporal encounters subject to both natural cycles and human influence.

Beneath Two Skies is also a photobook, and its format reinforces this expansive and recursive structure. As an object, the book allows the project to unfold over time, inviting the reader to engage with it in a way that mimics the rhythms of the burn technicians’ work. The sequencing creates a loop: the end suggests a return to the beginning, where early images now carry the trace of fire, even if unseen. This cyclical construction encourages a slower, more contemplative mode of looking—one that stretches perception rather than resolving it.

One of the most compelling aspects of Beneath Two Skies is how it situates human presence within the ecological processes it depicts. The relationship between the burn technicians and the landscape is neither heroic nor domineering; instead, it is quiet and impalpable. Hobler’s engagement with these practitioners allows him to witness their technical negotiation between the forces of nature and the necessities of stewardship—between control and surrender. His project becomes a meditation on the ethics of intervention, on the delicate balance between preserving an environment and shaping it.

Visually, the uncertain horizon leads to a sense of spatial instability—one that disorients but also poeticizes the landscape, allowing it to be read not only as geography but as metaphor. The horizon ceases to be a boundary and becomes instead a threshold—a liminal space between seeing and knowing, between destruction and rebirth. Hobler’s camera does not seek to fix the landscape in clarity; rather, it opens it up to interpretation, offering the viewer a space in which to dwell, to reflect, and to question.

Ultimately, Beneath Two Skies is not a project about fire, but about transformation. Through its lyrical rather than objective representation, it draws attention to the fragility of perception, the impermanence of memory, and the continual reshaping of the land by both natural forces and human hands.