Sara Heinonen

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”.

Witnessing the rapid transformation of Hamilton has incited Heinonen’s recent considerations around how to broaden the scope of her portrait of the city – from capture of distinctive moments to compressed presentation of a larger narrative. Her new piece created for inclusion in the 2023 Smokestack Quarterly collection, Welcome to the Ambitious City, demonstrates this new approach to her photographic practice and image making.

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

Sara Heinonen’s works have been featured in numerous exhibitions across the region including presentation in juried exhibitions with the Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa; Art Gallery of Hamilton; SNAP, Toronto; and the Art Gallery of Mississauga; and Paul Elia Gallery, Hamilton. In addition to her photographic practice, Heinonen is also a published author.