The fact that Franki Raffles is so little known is a travesty. The Jewish, Marxist, lesbian, feminist photographer worked for just over a decade, until she died in 1994, aged 39, while giving birth to twin daughters. In that time she trained her lens, with brilliant fervour, on women, portraying them as gritty, resilient agents of change. Raffles’ life, her work, and her death all speak to the sheer scale of sacrifices women make and the labour they endure in trying to hold a fractured society together.
A new exhibition devoted to Raffles at the Baltic, Gateshead is the largest institutional survey of her work to date. The curators – Emma Dean and Baltic’s director, Sarah Munro – combed through more than 40,000 negatives and contact sheets in Raffles’ archive. As a result, almost none of the 300 photographs in this show have been printed before – Raffles only left a few homemade prints. They offer an unprecedented view into the scope and mission of a photographer who was almost written out of history, even as she tried to record it.
The exhibition is perfectly timed and depressingly timely, bringing the political parallels between the 1980s and now into sharp, irrefutable focus. The clothing and furnishing may date the pictures, but the same issues facing the women Raffles photographed at work in factories in Tibet or Thatcherite Scotland, or chopping wood in the USSR, or working at midwifery clinics in Zimbabwe, the low wages, the precarity, the lack of access to affordable childcare, housing or welfare, the domestic violence have barely improved, and in some cases have worsened.
One stark difference between Raffles’ time and today, however, is the way she worked. Many of these photographs were commissioned by local authorities, intended to try to make sense of shocking statistics on social inequalities, to bolster the women’s movement. Raffles often developed her work with local councillors – a kind of comradeship that’s hard to imagine today. But it made me wonder, what might be possible now if local authorities were more forward-thinking, and if mutual trust could be forged between artists and the authorities?
Photographic projects that were exhibited in Raffles’ lifetime, such as To Let You Understand, portraying women at 40 workplaces across Edinburgh – were shown at swimming pools or leisure and community centres. Raffles didn’t consider herself an artist, nor her photographs artworks – the exhibition display here carefully takes this into account, displaying her images as constellations that gain momentum by number, giving a bird’s eye view over a society. Raffles was interested in the interconnectedness of women. She visualised intersectionality long before the term became part of the vernacular; her works find more similarities than differences between the various communities she worked alongside.
These parallels are evoked in abundance: sausages sold by women in the USSR are just like the sausages made by women in Edinburgh; women appear at the loom in Scotland and Russia; babies are born and bounced on the hip and raised in tandem with the physical labour. The women rarely stop and pose – they simply have too much to do. Raffles caught them doing back-breaking work, axes raised in the air like crucifixes, faces and hands etched with hardship, clothes stained with sweat and blood.
The exhibition presents documents of anti-poll tax protests in Scotland and anti-dictatorship protests in Manila side by side. Also included is Raffles’ best known work – an poster campaign for the charity she co-founded, Zero Tolerance, to raise awareness about domestic violence against women and children. The posters still pack a punch today with their bold typesetting and Raffles’ stark black and white photographs, both word and image subverting victim stereotypes to suggest – as one poster chillingly reads – “whoever, wherever, whenever”.
Another prescient work that chimes with heart-rending clarity today is Lot’s Wife, a project Raffles began in the early 1990s in Israel, before the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, and left unfinished when she died. It compiles testimonies of Jewish women who had recently resettled in Israel after the fall of the Soviet Union, with photographs by Raffles. The women’s observations widen the aperture on the domestic space, where women are forced to grapple with the consequences of war and conflict, while thinking of the future. “I don’t want my children to grow up thinking it is all right to treat other people like this,” one woman confides.
What makes Raffles’ sense of solidarity so convincing, perhaps, is the fact she not only photographed it, but she lived by it. When she set off on a road trip across the USSR to photograph women at work, she took her family with her – daughter Anna, then eight, and partner Sandy. She talked to her subjects at length and clearly made them feel at ease. She didn’t try – as many protest photographers now do – to make her subjects look sexy or cool. Raffles rallied and simply rolled up her sleeves and got on with the job. Yet her work was left unfinished. Just as the maxim goes: a woman’s work is never done.
Downstairs, an exhibition by Joanne Coates tells a tale of class and the countryside. Middle of Somewhere sees photographs hung on pink walls to mimic the movement of a migratory journey, as if moving up and down the contours of a rolling landscape, not unlike the places that appear in her images. Inspired by a visit to Raffles’ archive at St Andrews, Coates embarked on a new body of work that in many ways picks up where Raffles left off.
Coates set out to tell the stories of a young generation of women living on low incomes, revisiting remote rural communities on the Orkney islands and the Yorkshire Dales. Moving between enigmatic portraits and landscapes, Coates rejects the romanticised view of country living; these places are harsh, hostile and foreboding. She shows a union jack waving outside a butchers; a dead rabbit lying on an empty playing field. A solitary gravestone on a hillside is engraved with “TA-RA”. A note interrupts a picture-perfect pastoral view: “Take your bags of dog shit home.”
In a reclaimed wooden structure, built to resemble a rural bus stop, Coates presents a short film cutting archival and new footage together, with audio accounts from young women she photographed. They speak about precarity and poverty in their communities, of the menace of the climate crisis. These are pressing concerns for the next generation living in the UK – concerns that previous generations have not had to face. The exhibition builds to a climactic cliffhanger, with two portraits of two of the young subjects, their backs now turned to the camera, contemplating the landscapes they have grown up in, but soon may be forced to leave.
Franki Raffles: Photography, Activism, Campaign Works ends 16 March 2025. Joanne Coates: Middle of Somewhere ends 17 November 2024, both at Baltic, Gateshead
