TThe fact that Frankie Raffles is so little known is a travesty. The Jewish, Marxist, lesbian, feminist photographer worked for just over a decade until her death in 1994 at the age of 39 while giving birth to her twin daughters. At the time, she turned her lens on women with radiant enthusiasm, portraying them as gritty, resilient agents of change. Raffles’ life, her work, and her death all illustrate the enormous sacrifices women make and the labor they endure to bring together a divided society.
Gateshead, a new exhibition dedicated to Raffles on the Baltic Sea, is the largest systematic survey of her work to date. Curator Emma Dean and Baltic director Sarah Munro combed through more than 40,000 negatives and contact sheets in the Raffles archives. As a result, few of the 300 photographs of her featured in this exhibition have ever been printed, with Raffles retaining only a few home-made prints. They offer an unprecedented perspective on the scope and mission of photographers who sought to record but were largely written out of history.
The exhibition is perfectly timed and depressingly timely, bringing into irrefutable and sharp focus the political parallels between the 1980s and now. Clothes and furniture may bear the date of the photographs, but Raffles’ images of women facing Tibet, working in factories in Thatcherite Scotland, chopping wood in the Soviet Union, and working in midwifery clinics in Zimbabwe. The same problems that exist—low wages, insecurity, lack of access to affordable childcare, housing, welfare, and domestic violence—have done little to improve, and in some cases have worsened.
But one crucial difference between Raffles’ time and today is the way she works. Many of these photographs were commissioned by local authorities with the aim of making sense of shocking statistics on social inequality in order to promote the women’s movement. Raffles often worked with local councilors, a kind of camaraderie that is hard to imagine today. But she wondered what might be possible now if local authorities were more forward-thinking, and if mutual trust could be built between artists and authorities.
Photographic projects exhibited during Raffles’ life, including To Let You Understand, which depicts women in 40 workplaces across Edinburgh, were shown in swimming pools, leisure centers and community centres. Raffles did not consider herself an artist, nor did she consider her photographs to be her works of art. The exhibition here takes this into account carefully, displaying her images as a constellation fueled by numbers, giving a bird’s-eye view of society. Raffles was interested in the interconnectedness of women. She visualized intersectionality long before the term became part of everyday language. Her work shows more similarities than differences between the various communities she worked with.
Many of these similarities are evoked. The sausages sold by women in the Soviet Union are exactly the same as those made by women in Edinburgh. Women appear at the loom in Scotland and Russia. Babies are born, bounce on hips, and grow in parallel with physical labor. Women rarely stop and pose. But there’s just too much work to do. Raffles captured images of the men doing their grueling work, their axes held in the air like crosses, their faces and hands marked with the marks of suffering, their clothes stained with sweat and blood.
This exhibition juxtaposes records from the Scottish anti-poll tax demonstrations and the anti-dictatorship demonstrations in Manila. Raffles’ most famous work, a poster for the charity she co-founded, also includes her campaign. zero tolerance, raising awareness about domestic violence against women and children. The posters still pack a punch with their bold typesetting and stark black-and-white photography of Raffles, subverting stereotypes of victims in both words and images, with one poster chillingly stating, “Anyone, any time, any place.” Words like this are written.
Another visionary work that resonates with heartbreaking clarity today is Lot’s Wife., The project was started by Raffles in Israel in the early 1990s, before the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, and was left unfinished when she died. The book is a collection of testimonies from Jewish women who recently resettled in Israel after the collapse of the Soviet Union, along with Raffles’ photographs. The women’s observations broaden our perspective into domestic spaces where women are forced to deal with the consequences of war and conflict while thinking about the future. “I don’t want my children to grow up thinking it’s okay to treat others this way,” one woman confesses.
Perhaps what makes Raffles’ sense of solidarity so compelling is the fact that she not only photographed it, but lived it. When she set out on a trip across the Soviet Union to photograph the women at her workplace, she took her family, her then 8-year-old daughter Anna and her partner Sandy, with her. She spoke at length with her subjects and clearly put them at ease. She didn’t try to make her subjects look sexy or cool, as many protest photographers are doing now. Mr. Raffles composed herself and simply rolled up her sleeves and went about her business. However, her work was left unfinished. As the saying goes, a woman’s work is never done.
Downstairs, an exhibition by Joan Coates tells stories of class and the countryside. In “Middle of Somewhere,” photographs are hung on a pink wall, imitating the movement of a migratory journey, as if moving up and down the contours of a undulating landscape. It is no different from the place that appears in. Inspired by a visit to Raffles’ archives at St Andrews, Coates embarked on a new body of work that in many ways picks up where Raffles left off.
Coates revisited remote rural communities in Orkney and the Yorkshire Dales to tell the stories of young women living on low incomes.. Moving between enigmatic portraits and landscapes, Coates rejects romanticized views of rural life. These places are harsh, hostile, and sinister. She shows the Union Jack waving her hand outside her butcher shop. A dead rabbit lying in an empty stadium. A tombstone stands alone on the hillside with the word “TA-RA” engraved on it. Interrupting the picturesque countryside is a note that says, “Bring home the bag of dog poop.”
In a reclaimed wooden structure built to resemble a rural bus stop, Coates will present a short film of archival and new footage, complete with audio from the young women she filmed. They talk about the precarity and poverty in their communities and the threat of the climate crisis. These are pressing concerns for the next generation of people living in the UK, and concerns that previous generations did not have to face. The exhibition builds to a climactic cliffhanger. Two portraits of two young subjects are on display. With their backs to the camera, they contemplate the landscape in which they grew up, but they may soon be forced to leave.
