Our iconic Black Street roller door shop front has been immortalised in miniature form thanks to @joshua_smith_street_artist. As Hillvale’s original location, this spot will be forever in our hearts. We’ve made a lot of memories here and developed a lot too. Hillvale started off 11 years ago as a fun little side project, when the pharmacy photo lab where Jason worked at as a teenager in Swan Hill was getting rid of their broken machine, and Andy and Jason decided to go pick it up to develop their own rolls. Driving from Melbourne, we pulled over on the side of the road at 3am to stare at the stars in the dark of the countryside, and on the following day returning with processor on trailer, around the same spot, the car blew up and we stared at the sun waiting for a tow. Jason’s brother Rhys gave us a tow to Bendigo, where Andy’s dad Wayne met us to tow back to Melbourne. It was in Andy’s parents garage in Greenvale where we fixed and put our first roll through the machine. Black Street was the permanent space we found to house the film processor that was destined for landfill. When we called up photo chemical suppliers explaining that we wanted to start up an old film processor, they laughed and said we were foolish. This was at a time that the photo lab industry was on a downward trajectory. Labs were beginning to close, or offload their film processing equipment to concentrate only on digital printing. During the early years of Hillvale we went to a lot of labs from all over Victoria and NSW, collecting equipment and ephemera. We saw the last remnants of an industry in decline. Black Street is where Hillvale grew organically into what we are today, from a humble community space for developing friends’ photos into a working lab with thousands of rolls passing through each week. From the start there have always been challenges and this is something that we work through. Solving problems is a blessing. It’s exciting to see where the photographic industry is headed, and as they say, it’s the journey not the destination. We are still on this ride, starting over again in our new location on Edward Street. #hillvale