The British photographer Franki Raffles (1955-94) died shockingly young, as a result of complications following the birth of twin daughters. But by then she had already amassed almost 40,000 images of women at work the world over. Her photographs are as strong as their subjects. Raffles photographed women in the Philippines, Israel and China, the Orkneys, Mexico and Ukraine. She portrayed harvesters at dawn and cleaners at midnight, seasonal onion pickers, part-time teachers and lifelong factory workers. She was a tireless activist of the camera.
Her photographs amounted to campaigns – look and learn, see what is going on, what it is like for these women, then do what you can – sometimes with a specific end in mind. Anyone who waited at the bus stops of Edinburgh in the 80s, for instance, as I did, will remember Raffles’s devastating photographic protests against male violence.
I have never forgotten her image of an elegant woman in a New Town flat, leafing through a magazine before a working Georgian fireplace. Above runs the caption: “She lives with a successful businessman”. Below runs the punchline, so to speak: “Last week he hospitalised her”. Some of the images from this campaign could, alas, be run all over again at British bus stops today.
After a philosophy degree at St Andrews University, Raffles moved to the remote village of Callanish on the Isle of Lewis in the 1970s. There she worked as a self-employed weaver for the Harris tweed industry to support her first child, and her fledgling photography. What she knows informs what she sees.
A young woman in an anorak toils over a handloom in a cold, bare room, the light so poor she has to bend right down, close to her work. Others are stacking products in a nameless stone barn. There are weatherworn farmers out in the fields, some of them cutting ancient peat from the land in overalls and specs, or wrangling the local sheep.
A sequence of sheep shearers is especially moving for the sight of elderly women in what must once have been their good hats and coats kneeling on the ground, practically eye to eye with the wriggling animals. Later, one of them looks straight out of a closeup portrait indoors. Bill Brandt-like in its grainy darkness, it is by no means as dour, for the Lewis woman is beaming straight back at Raffles.
That smile is almost a characteristic of the 300 images on show at Baltic. Two – or is it perhaps even three – generations of Russian women in overalls have paused, momentarily, from their haymaking for Raffles’s camera. They recede towards misty mountains, a collective smile slowly breaking towards the youngest at the back. Teachers, typists, nurses, dinner ladies, across several continents, all share their conversation and their humour with her camera.
Her photographs are almost all in black and white, without staging or hyperbole. Raffles worked mainly in long-shot, avoiding character studies, her eye always on situation and context. Lot’s Wife, funded by a Wingate Trust scholarship in the early 1990s, shows the bitterly hard lives of Jewish women emigrating to Israel after the collapse of the USSR. Nearly all had significant jobs but are now unemployed, marooned at home with small children; in accompanying texts, nearly all speak of losing their sense of community.
And that is perhaps what strikes the viewer today, before these dense walls of Raffles’s photographs: that they are about what they show, which is collective experience. They were meant to enlighten – shown as much in libraries, public halls and the media, as in art galleries – and so they still do, except that this intense portrait of women worldwide now presents a spirit of community that feels like disappearing history.
Hannah Perry (born 1984) is an ideal partner to Raffles, with her multimedia exhibition upstairs at Baltic. Manual Labour concerns the intersection between women’s experiences of class, work and childbirth, and the heavy industry of Perry’s native north of England. It runs from the sublime to the brutal.
A very beautiful choral work of women’s voices in roundelay, almost ecstatic, echoes through the high gallery as a gigantic bronze pelvis, mounted on scaffolding, gradually starts to shift. Anyone familiar with childbirth will know that the great structure – somewhere between a Henry Moore and a muckle seafaring propeller – is about to separate in two. But Perry goes further, producing an abrupt and startling surprise.
On a vast cinema screen, girls push prams through shopping centres, visit clinics, are rebuked by overworked doctors. A pregnant woman turns among mirrors in nightclub darkness (the artist herself), intercut with the pelvic motions of a pole dancer in an actual club. Molten metal, concrete, furious industrial sound and light are intercut with these young women’s lives in complex film collage.
Sheets of taut metal, stretched on poles through the gallery, vibrate ever more anxiously to the sound of nameless rumbling, as clocks chime and bells ring. At times, the film on the screen seems to quiver and pulsate like the sheet metal. The world of toxic industry (or is it masculinity) streams in and out of these evocations of women’s experiences to an alarming degree, at times too rough to behold.
But when the elements – hydraulic, sculptural, harmonic, cinematic – do come together, Manual Labour mobilises a sharp polarity between men and women’s work. And at the same time, it appears to be drawing parallels between them – between the intense physicality of both kinds of labour.
Star ratings (out of five)
Franki Raffles: Photography, Activism, Campaign Works ★★★★
Hannah Perry: Manual Labour ★★★