Mark Simmons

Spatula is working with Bristol photographer Mark Simmons to reopen an archive shaped by protest, community and social change across the city.

For decades, Mark has photographed people as they gather, organise, resist, celebrate and claim space. His images offer more than a record of individual moments. Together, they reveal something of Bristol’s political and cultural life, and of the people who have continually remade it.

Much of this work has remained unseen for years. Now, we are beginning to bring parts of the archive back into public view, not simply as history, but as material that can speak to the present.

The work begins with the photographs themselves: digitising selected images, tracing their context and creating opportunities for people to encounter them properly. Around that, we are developing public events and conversations exploring documentary photography, memory, media and movement.

Who is remembered? Who gets to shape the record? What changes when an act of protest becomes an image, and an image becomes history?

These questions sit closely within Spatula’s interest in community powered media. An archive is never only about what happened. It can reveal how stories are carried, whose experiences remain visible and what a city chooses to remember.

Working with Mark also creates an opportunity to slow down. His photographs hold gestures, expressions, relationships and tensions that are easily lost in faster forms of media. They ask us to look again, and to consider what exists beyond the immediate spectacle of an event.

As the project develops, we will share more from the archive and create spaces for people to gather around the work, contribute their own knowledge and connect these images with the city as it exists now.