Franki Raffles: everyday scenes of working women in the Eighties rendered remarkable

In the 10 years leading up to her untimely death in 1994 aged 39, while giving birth to twins, Edinburgh-based photographer Franki Raffles took over 40,000 pictures, many of women at work. Art galleries are frequently putting on ‘forgotten female artist’ shows, less so forgotten feminist photographers. Thanks to a few enthusiastic curators, this remarkable show takes us back to the 1980s and early 90s, during which Raffles worked with women’s organisations, trades unions and charities such as Women’s Aid, documenting the working lives of women both in the UK and abroad. Raffles made adventurous trips to the Soviet Union, to China, India, Israel and elsewhere, camera always trained on what ordinary working women were doing to make a living.

Grounded in left-wing feminism, Raffles turned her lens on the workplace and daily life. Baltic’s exhibition presents Raffle’s brief, intense career in large, wall-filling groups of images arranged chronologically, each staging a particular series or project. In Britain, we find ourselves on schools and hospitals, laundries and food processing, mail sorting, administration. There’s a lot of cleaning, mopping floors, and dusting offices. In Russia, we see female farmworkers toiling in fields, or factory workers busy making dresses and shoes. An early series documents the run-down, threadbare fishing communities of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides.

More committed than the usual photojournalist, and never a self-conscious ‘art’ photographer, Raffles’ frames these everyday scenes with a matter-of-fact lack of staging, avoiding exaggerated composition, and isn’t much interested in making individual character studies or portraits. Her eye is on is her subjects’ situation, the facts of what women have to get on with to make a living. These were images made as a form of activism, for circulation in publication or for shows toured to un-arty community venues, and an important part of Raffle’s approach included the recording of women’s own words, interview material that would appear as caption texts alongside. That element is downplayed here, excluded from the images on the walls, while archive documents in nearby vitrines – publications magazines, pamphlets, letters – tell the stories of these projects, along with a large table of reading matter occupies the centre of the main gallery.

There’s an inadvertent blast of nostalgia in these jumps back to the years of Thatcher’s Britain – the perms and push-button phones, the smoking in the workplace, the pubs and bingo halls. It’s not a trivial sense though; while working people’s lives weren’t easy during the 80s, it’s hard not to miss the strong sense of community in these images. One wonders what Raffles would have made of the housing crisis, impossible childcare costs and the fraying sense of local (and national) community.

On another floor is a show by young photographer Joanne Coates. In vivid contrast to Raffles, Coates’s portraits and audio stories of young women living in rural Yorkshire and the Orkneys, pictured alone against stark and humid landscapes, seem almost romantic at first glance. But they’re spiked with their subjects’ anxieties about housing, uncertain work and dwindling public services. The contrast is the bleak sense of isolation and political paralysis. Four decades later from Raffles’ activism, where have we got to?

Franki Raffles runs until March 2025. Joanne Coates runs until November 2024; baltic.art