Sara Heinonen centres her photographic practice on her hometown of Hamilton, ON. Inspired by the unique character of the city’s urban fabric, Heinonen seeks to “record the beauty of everyday places and views as careful compositions focused on light, colour and form”. Recently, her witness of the rapid transformation of Hamilton has incited Heinonen’s consideration of how to broaden the scope of her portrait of the city – from capture of distinctive moments to compressed presentation of a larger narrative.
Hamilton is undergoing an urban renaissance not unlike the one that gave us the handsomely modern Stelco Tower at Jackson Square fifty years ago. This time around, cranes encircle this central building —cranes that will transform the city with more and taller buildings filled with condominium units. Though Hamilton has a tiger-tough vibe, it’s just a kitten of a metropolis with some rough patches we might just want to hang on to for old time’s sake.
I wanted to use the Smokestack Quarterly opportunity to experiment with using multiple images to push my photography practice. The montage of photographs taken on the streets of the city is a play on classical triptych paintings with a nod to Berenice Abbott’s documentary photography project Changing New York. In this case, it’s Hamilton Changing and it’s a pixel-rich punch of colour.
-Sara Heinonen
