Real Photography Company
at Bristol Community Darkrooms

Ruth has a 1st class Photography BA Hons Degree and 30 years experience in photography, teaching and community arts. She worked at Watershed Media Centre managing darkrooms, community photography projects and courses, and supervised relocation of Watershed's darkrooms to St Pauls Learning Centre in 2005. From 2006 Ruth delivered arts and community engagement programmes at Bristol Royal Hospital for Children, Felix Rd Adventure Playground and Monica Wills House, Bristol. She now teaches photography and manages St Pauls Darkrooms, having rediscovered her love for black and white and experimental photographic processes.

Justin is a Bristol photographer who has specialised in pinhole photography and camera obscura creation for the past 30 years. He has taught locally and internationally and has published several educational books on light and photography, but seems to be best known for taking photos from inside his mouth. He has a BA (Hons) degree in Fine Art Photography from Derby Lonsdale College, a PGCE in Secondary Education and is an Associate Lecturer at Falmouth University.

Anna's background as an Art Psychotherapist working with children and young people has informed her creative practice as a photographer. She is particularly interested in traditional processes and how, from the unexpected, a beautiful image can emerge. She enjoys processes where photography can have a painterly feel, such as gum bichromate and cyanotypes, and the experimental aspect including using seaweed as a film developer and turmeric to produce images. 

Chloe Vlahos is a British photographer and non-narrative video artist based in Bristol, UK.

 

Her visual work focuses on the intersections between longing, memory, and landscape, and how these elements interact in subtle ways to influence each other. Chloe seeks to create images that are quiet but textured – evoking a sense of remembering something you didn’t know you had forgotten.

​Having grown up in the Devon countryside Colin found photography as a young boy, taking pictures of dragonflies around the garden pond on days off from school. He went on to gain a degree in Conservation Biology, only to circle back to his earlier passion of photography a few years later, but this time focussing on making pictures of people. Although it's not always obvious, his pictures are still heavily influenced by nature, using its softness and vibrance to bring images to life. Colin also found a passion for printing colour in the darkroom and has spent the last 3 years teaching himself how to make the best print possible!

Frank is a photographer, lecturer and researcher in historic photographic processes. Interested in the works of early photographers, he likes nothing better than to find an obscure photographic process to re-create with current technologies, sometimes even digital!

Recently, Frank was commissioned to take dry-gelatine glass plate photographs at Stonehenge for an exhibition at Wiltshire Museum ‘A Wiltshire Thatcher-A Photographic Journey through Victorian Wessex’. Alongside his teaching and research, Frank is the co-founder of ‘the SIM project’ https://thesimproject.com/, making photographic keep-sake jewellery with asylum seekers and refugees.

Mike is a Bristol based photographer and lecturer with an MA in Photography and a DET in Education and Training. After a 15-year freelance career in commercial photography and publishing, the lure of paid holiday and a pension resulted in a transition to arts education, and he is currently course leader for HE Photography at the City of Bristol College. Alongside teaching, his creative practice is centred around the landscape and the agency that forms between place, artist, and visual outcome, with a particular interest in analogue image making. His website is www.michael-crocker.co.uk

Sofia Yu is a visual artist with a BA in Photography and an MA in Media Production: TV Documentary Production. She has worked as a freelance photographer campaigning alongside NGOs, for Human Rights.  Sofia has also worked as a photography teacher and a contributor for Getty LATAM. Academically, she ventured into an MPhil/ PhD in Visual Anthropology giving continuity to her body of work which focuses mainly on Indigenous communities and their struggles, until she moved to Bristol in 2022. In Bristol, she is currently documenting the local Brazilian community.