Ruth Jacobs - Founder Director
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 Quinnell - Founder Director
Justin was born in and lives in Bristol in the UK. has a PGCE as well as a Ba(hons) degree in fine art photography from Derby Lonsdale College. For the past 7 years he has been a director of the Real Photography Company who manage the community darkrooms in St Pauls in Bristol. He is considered to be one of the world experts in pinhole photography, camera obscuras and experimental photography which he has been teaching for over 30 years at all levels from primary to university level in the UK and worldwide. Other establishments include: The Photographers Gallery, The Martin Parr Foundation, the Science Museum, The British Library, Lacock Abbey, Lomo New York and the Corcoran in Washington DC and lecture tours of the US, Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong.
He has an extensive portfolio of work but is known worldwide for ‘Mouthpiece’ where he used a small pinhole camera to take images from inside his mouth. He is also known for innovative camera obscura designs.
For 20 years he has been an associate lecturer in photography at Falmouth University and has been an organizer of the annual Experimental Photography Festival in Barcelona (EXP) since its inception.
Frank Menger - Director
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’, making photographic keep-sake jewellery with asylum seekers and refugees.
Mike Crocker - Director
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
Donna Lyons – Associate Director
Donna is a Bristol-based photographer, she graduated from UWE Bristol with a First Class BA (Hons) in Photography in 2025 and is establishing an active photographic practice exploring people, place, identity and the everyday.
Her work is rooted in observation and connection, with a particular interest in people, place, identity and visibility. Work from her ongoing project Beyond the Veil has been selected for the RWA 173 Annual Open Exhibition, while Thalassophile, from the same body of work, has been acquired by the University of Bristol for its new Temple Quarter Enterprise Campus, opening in Autumn 2026.
Alongside her own practice, Donna has experience working creatively with young people and communities and is passionate about creating opportunities for people to discover photography, experiment and develop their own creative practice.
Ashutosh Shaktan - Associate Director
Ashutosh Shaktan is a research-based narrative artist working with photography whose practice critically engages with the ideological dimensions of documentary photography. Working at the intersection of documentary and constructed imagery, his practice examines questions of truth, authenticity, and decolonisation through photography itself, interrogating the medium’s contextual language while exploring its expanded possibilities. He is interested in what he describes as “aesthetics by other means” photographic approaches informed by decolonial ways of sensing and understanding time, memory, space, and meaning. He holds an MA in Photography from UWE Bristol and was a recipient of the SPIN–Martin Parr Foundation Fellowship (2024–25). His work has been exhibited and presented at international festivals and exhibitions, and published in international magazines and academic journals. He is currently based in Bristol.
Alongside his artistic practice, he works with his father in cultivating apples at their family home in the foothills of the Western Himalayas in India.
Rosie Viilup - Associate Director
Rosie is a Bristol-based experimental photographer, working primarily with mordançage and cyanotype animation. She graduated with a First-Class BA (Hons) in Creative Direction in 2021.
From September 2026, Rosie will be teaching courses at Bristol Community Darkroom, including cyanotype animation and mordançage collage. Her practice combines historic photographic processes with contemporary moving-image techniques, exploring how analogue methods can be used in new and playful ways.
A nomadic lifestyle has sparked her interest in subcultures around the world, and she is currently developing a subculture magazine in which each project is created using a different experimental photographic technique.
Her aim is to introduce more people to historic photographic processes and encourage a renewed joy in making art by hand.
