Melbourne Suburbia
8 April 2025It occurred to me just the other day that for just under two bloody years, I’ve been traipsing around greater Melbourne on a quest to capture every single one of its 378 suburbs (according to my list) and I’ve never taken the time to promote this ridiculous endeavour in any meaningful way. Photographers who are better marketers (and, I imagine, better photographers) than me would surely have promoted something like this, but I’ve only alluded to it briefly here and there without ever truly introducing it.
At time of writing, I’m on the home stretch. 341 suburbs down, just 37 to go, all in Melbourne’s south-east. The Google map where I pin every one I’ve completed shows a mass of little green dots surrounding most of Port Phillip bay. It’s arguably high time I say something about this.
So allow me to introduce it now. I am Andrew Páramos, and since mid-2023 I’ve drifted quietly like a capricious crisp packet in the breeze from one corner of one of the world’s most sprawling cities to another, trying to find beauty in places it shouldn’t be, peace in places in nobody thinks to look, and some semblance of purpose in a life crumbling under the weight of mental illness and a world that is itself crumbling faster than I ever could.
(I should quickly point out at this juncture that the two years I’ve worked on this have been awful for me, and my partner, our adorable dog, and photography have borne the burden of keeping me alive.)
I started, with dull predictability, in Melbourne’s CBD (Central Business District for people who like their city centres to have less pretentious labels). My next suburb was Briar Hill, because that was where I lived at the time. My sixth, for some reason, was Lalor. If you know Lalor, you’d have thought it could have waited. 100 was Prahran, 200 was Flemington, 300 was Frankston North. At times, there was truly no rhyme or reason to where I went or the order I followed, only that I went somewhere I hadn’t already been.
And now I’m almost done. I expect to be done by the end of the month... and then what? I’ve thought about that, because while I’m a modest-to-self-hating person who thinks nothing I do means anything, I can uneasily just about accept that this really will be a minor achievement when it’s done. For starters, I recently treated myself to a fine art printer so I can start a little cottage industry selling prints of some of the nicer shots I’ve taken, not all of which are from the nicer places I’ve visited. My first test prints look alarmingly good. If that goes to plan, they’ll be available through the Shop page I recently added here.
I’m also considering either a zine, a series of zines, or maybe even a book, but this may require revisiting some suburbs to improve on my photo haul. My shots from Albert Park (44) are candidly quite weak, and for some reason I used a film simulation in Carlton North (73) so my shots from there just look a little odd. Melbourne (1) isn’t quite my style. And please, don’t get me started on Lysterfield South (328).
On a more positive note, Springvale (20) was a lot of fun, Sunshine North (46) exceeded my expectations, and I can see future mini-projects in places like Heidelberg West (12) and Doveton (333). I think photography feels most natural to me in places that remind me of where I grew up, so make of that what you will.
Anyway, this piece of work in whatever form it takes will be titled Elation, after the absurdly- and inappropriately-named Elation Boulevard in Doreen, where I once resided against my better judgement. In the vanishingly unlikely event of any publishers not only reading this but taking an interest, feel free to say hello.