Judging from the photo of Donald Saaramaki hanging in an exhibit at city hall, you wouldn’t know he 
Andrew Woodman, Centretown News
Onno Kremers (right) and one of his subjects, Allen, pose in front of Allen’s portrait at Ottawa City Hall. had been through some tough times.
“Early 20s I hit rock bottom,” Saaramaki says. “I had not much patience back then. Just liked to party and stuff.”
But amateur photographer Onno Kremers’ exhibit, featuring users and staff of the Sandyhill drop-in day program, Centre 454, doesn’t show what his subjects lack – which for many of them is a home.
“Usually homeless [people] are portrayed in a very stereotypical way photographically,” Kremers says. “They’re a wonderful subject because they are, in the minds of some photographers, so extreme. We didn’t want that here.”
When Kremers’ photos went up at city hall on Feb. 10 to celebrate the centre’s 60th anniversary, they displayed what the people he captured do have.
For Saaramaki that’s a story of triumph. In the photo he’s got a big smile on as he points one hand up to the sky. He’s come “full circle” from living in a shelter in Toronto back in his 20s to now working as a janitor at the centre (he started off as a volunteer and then staff helped him get into a janitorial course).
“It felt nice to have someone interested in my story and wanting to know more about me,” Saaramaki says of being photographed by Kremers.
This project was not a normal photo shoot where you go “quickly in and out,” Kremers says.
“This is a community that wasn’t used to having photographers in their midst in the first place,” he says. “So it became a process of being accepted in the community and building trust with the participants.”
To build that trust he gave his subjects licence over how they would be portrayed.
“How do you want to portray yourself to the rest of the world?” Kremers asked, while letting people rip up photos of them they didn’t like.
In one shot, all that can be made out of the man in the photo is his curly grey hair and thick beard; his face is covered in shawdow.
“I’d like to contribute to this project and help people understand the centre,” the plaque below reads. “But I don’t feel comfortable including my photo. I became homeless about eight years ago and a lot of people don’t know I’m homeless. I’m afraid they would judge me. I worry that I could lose some friends.”
Photographers heading out into the streets should be sensitive to situations like that, says John Kelly, professor of photography at Carleton University.
“Street photography is designed to break stereotypes, not create them, not perpetuate them,” he says. “At the same time, you have to present the reality of the situation. And so the question is how do you go about doing that; what are the ethics?”