TThe British photographer Frankie Raffles (1955-94) died at a shockingly young age from complications following the birth of her twin daughters. But by that time she had already amassed nearly 40,000 images of women at work around the world. Her photographs are as powerful as her subjects. Raffles photographed women in the Philippines, Israel and China, the Orkney Islands, Mexico and Ukraine. She portrayed harvest workers at dawn and cleaners at midnight, seasonal workers, part-time teachers and factory workers who worked in the factory all their lives. She was a tireless activist of the camera.
Her photographs were campaigns – look and learn, see what’s going on, how these women are, and then do what you can – sometimes with a specific goal in mind. Anyone who waited at Edinburgh bus stops in the 1980s, like me, will remember Raffles’ 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 in front of a working Georgian fireplace, with the caption: “She lives with a successful businessman.” Below that, the punch line: “Last week he put her in hospital.” Some of the images from that campaign could, sadly, be shown at British bus stops again today.
After studying philosophy 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 finance her first child and her fledgling photography. What she knows shapes what she sees.
A young woman in an anorak toils away at a handloom in a cold, bare room. The light is so bad that she has to bend down close to her work. Others stack produce in a nameless stone barn. Weather-beaten farmers can be seen in the fields, some of them in overalls and glasses, digging ancient peat out of the ground or tending the local sheep.
One sequence of sheep shearers is particularly moving because it shows elderly women kneeling on the ground in their once-good hats and coats, practically eye to eye with the struggling animals. Later, one of them looks like she’s come straight out of a close-up interior portrait. In its grainy darkness, it’s Bill Brandt-like, but nowhere near as grim, with the Lewis woman beaming directly at Raffles.
This smile is almost a feature of the 300 images on display at the Baltic. Two – or maybe even three – generations of Russian women in overalls have paused for a moment from their haymaking to see Raffles’ camera. They retreat towards the misty mountains, and a collective smile slowly spreads among the youngest in the background. Teachers, typists, nurses, kitchen helpers from several continents – all sharing their conversation and humor with her camera.
Her photographs are almost all in black and white and without staging or exaggeration. Raffles worked mainly with wide shots and avoided character studies. Her focus was always on the situation and the context. Lot’s wifefunded by a Wingate Trust grant in the early 1990s, it depicts the bitter lives of Jewish women who emigrated to Israel after the collapse of the USSR. Almost all had important jobs but are now unemployed and stranded at home with young children; in the accompanying texts, almost all speak of having lost their sense of community.
And that is perhaps what strikes the viewer today, in front of these dense walls of Raffles’ photographs: that they are about what they show, namely Collective Experience. They were meant to educate – they are shown in libraries, public halls and the media as well as in art galleries – and they still do, only now this intense portrait of women worldwide presents a community spirit that feels like disappearing history.
Hannah Perry (born 1984) is an ideal partner for Raffles with her multimedia exhibition on the upper floor of Baltic. Handcraft is about the intersection of women’s experiences of class, work and childbirth and the heavy industry of Perry’s native north of England. It ranges from the sublime to the brutal.
A beautiful, almost ecstatic choral work with women’s voices echoes through the upper gallery as a huge bronze basin mounted on a scaffold begins to move. Anyone who knows anything about childbirth knows that the great structure – somewhere between a Henry Moore and a giant ship’s propeller – is about to split in half. But Perry goes further, delivering an abrupt and startling surprise.
On a giant cinema screen, girls push strollers through shopping malls, visit clinics and are reprimanded by overworked doctors. A pregnant woman spins between mirrors (the artist herself) in the darkness of a nightclub, interspersed with the pelvic movements of a pole dancer in a real club. Molten metal, concrete, angry industrial sounds and light are interspersed with the lives of these young women in a complex film collage.
Sheets of metal stretched across the gallery on poles vibrate ever more restlessly to the sound of nameless rumbles as clocks chime and bells toll. At times the film on the screen seems to tremble and pulsate like the sheet metal. The world of toxic industry (or is it masculinity) flows in and out of these evocations of women’s experiences at an alarming rate, sometimes too harsh to bear.
Yet when the elements – hydraulic, sculptural, harmonic, cinematic – come together, Manual Labour mobilises a sharp polarity between the work of men and women. And at the same time, it seems to draw parallels between them – between the intense physicality of both types of work.
Star ratings (out of five)
Franki Raffles: Photography, activism, campaigning ★★★★
Hannah Perry: Handwork ★★★
