ANDREW PÁRAMOS
The World Ends at Bell Street
The World Ends at Bell Street is, frankly, an attempt to get out of a slump. It’s a largely topographic series focussed on and around Bell Street, a lengthy major road cutting across Melbourne’s north from Pascoe Value South to Heidelberg.
I’ve been working with film a lot more in recent months and the current plan is to make this a film-only project, using a mix of 35 and 120, black & white and colour. My efforts so far have been poor, even allowing for my tendency to assume all of my work is terrible – believe it or not, the images below are currently the best of the bunch. Hopefully this will change in due course, or I’ll have to pivot back to digital so I don’t waste more money at the lab.
‘The world ends at Bell Street’, incidentally, is an expression I heard a colleague utter shortly after I arrived in Melbourne from the north-east of England. Said colleague was herself a new arrival from Perth and I think she was sharing something she’d heard rather than her personal opinion, but either way it indicated a belief held by some that everything beyond Bell Street wasn’t worthy of consideration. Bell Street does indeed feel like a border of sorts between the cool inner north and the more down-to-earth outer north.
Melbourne has changed a great deal in the 15 years (at time of writing) I’ve lived here, including many areas lying to the north of Bell Street, but Bell Street itself seems to resist. I’ve lived on both sides, for what it’s worth.