The late Marxist-Feminist photographer Franki Raffles (1955–1994), known for documenting the working lives of women, believed her photographs were a means to an end. It was their circulation as pamphlets, posters and on billboards which established them as dynamic agents of social transformation, and not simply the issue of counter-informational rhetoric. Staying with Raffles’ photographs as social objects – without removing their archival context – is thus the central challenge of Franki Raffles: Photography, Activism, Campaign Works.
Spanning Raffles’ prodigious output between 1984 to 1994, Baltic’s location in the North East notably shifts the lens on her photographic practice, rarely exhibited outside of a Scottish context. Scotland shaped much of her life, activism and consequently, her immense body of work, numbering some 40,000 images. Photography, Activism, Campaign Works acknowledges the debt this body of work owes to the community and institutional support which enabled Raffles to travel in her lifetime – a courtesy now extended to her photographs.
A dominant conceit of the exhibition is that no one photograph is displayed in isolation, with the curation of the show replicating the multiple and serial format of the contact sheet on the wall. The one exception is a photograph of Raffles herself, imploring the viewer to pause, by way of acknowledgement, upon first entering the exhibition. In many ways, this portrait of Raffles constitutes the first of many footnotes, briefly anchoring the retrospective in her image. Nonetheless, this exhibition shifts focus decidedly away from the trope of the lone photographer.

The controlled lighting in the exhibition that follows conveys a hushed atmosphere, conferring an intimacy upon the viewer that echoes archival viewing conditions. Sections on ‘USSR’ (1989) and ‘Women Workers’ (1983-94) survey women’s occupations in Russia, Georgia, Ukraine and Scotland respectively. Both sections are conceived as an impressive tesserae of aluminium dibond prints, set on opposing walls and intended to be viewed en masse, as collected works.
Moving away from the main gallery, the second room focuses on how Raffles sought to extend her feminist activism by mutualising access to photographic equipment and resources in her work with other stigmatised communities. Raffles consulted on the composition and content of projects in service to disability activism, such as We Can Take Pictures (1983), a project Raffles facilitated in partnership with children with learning disabilities at Pinewood Special School, and What is Disability? Your Frame of Mind is Our Disability (1992-3), themselves critiques of the perceived invalidity of disabled people that acted in powerful opposition to attitudinal barriers.
The section ‘Disability, Photography and Social Practice’ features eight unframed photographs from these projects, together with a sketchbook and printed matter that map their development. This humble display powerfully situates Raffles as facilitator and mentor, as opposed to principal photographer.
‘Disability, Photography and Social Practice’ also signals Baltic Director Sarah Munro’s working partnership with Raffles through What is Disability?, commissioned by Artlink Edinburgh in 1991 where Munro worked as Project Director. Munro also briefly appears in the main gallery. Against one of three partition boards that encloses a study space, she has chosen to display her reference snaps, taken on iPhone while sifting through boxes of Raffles’ archive. Their inclusion feels incongruous, pulling focus from the viewer’s experience.
Nonetheless, the curation of ‘Disability, Photography and Social Practice’ is inflected with the idea of friendship as a necessary condition of practice, demonstrating a shared politics, trust and commitment that is key to the positioning of these photographs as social objects. One particularly striking photograph from What is Disability? shows disabled artist Brian Jenkins staring down the barrel of the camera lens and surrounded by wrapped condoms attached to a mobile with a banner reading ‘sexless’. These photographs were pasted on billboards across Edinburgh and installed by Munro herself with the support of Arthur Watson of Peacock Printmakers, Aberdeen. Watson agreed to print and scale the works when no local printer would accommodate. Transporting these works from Aberdeen to Edinburgh, together with their immense size, made their installation part of the mission. Campaign Works seeks to maintain the object status of Raffles’ photographs, here belonging to a now-historic intervention in public space.
The section dedicated to ‘Zero Tolerance’, the campaign against domestic violence which Raffles co-founded with Evelyn Gillan and Susan Hart, is most successful in its visual attribution of the women responsible for the commissioning and development of these images. This continues a general trend of the exhibition, citing the multiple hands at work in any one of Raffles’ photographic projects. Three campaign posters hung as a triptych are featured alongside Raffles’ candid portraits of Gillan and Hart in attendance at a parliamentary committee. The choice to display these posters alongside the women who co-founded the campaign serves to demonstrate how a feminist politics of citation might be reflected in curatorial practice, directing attention to personal as well as professional alliances.

At the same time, the section on ‘Zero Tolerance’ demonstrates how Raffles utilised the camera to document the dissemination of the campaign across Edinburgh. Moreover, the exhibition upholds the object status of these photographs in calling upon the strategies used to configure them as billboards, posters and bus advertisements, which frequently incorporate elements of advertising and graphic design. In What is Disability?, Raffles recommended a sans serif font with wide apertures and slanted letters, set against a high contrast that favoured the monochromatic film. Come 1992, the use of a dynamic ‘Z’ in the Zero Tolerance campaign was altogether more defiant, once described by photographer Alicia Bruce as ‘uncompromising as a letter… not curvy, not compliant’. Raffles’ sensitivity to typography, placement, and language frame these images as functional, tangible objects.
The Zero Tolerance campaign penetrated Edinburgh’s streets, dramatically countering preconceptions of domestic violence as a ‘private problem’. In photographs documenting billboards and banners adorning buses and bus stops, this tension was intensified. As objects, the Zero Tolerance material no longer unfolded inwardly, as ephemera meekly displayed in waiting rooms or sandwiched between ads in the local paper, but advanced forward and into public space. The prevalence of Zero Tolerance material on the street and the vantage points from which these images were seen – from a distance, on approach, from below – informed an intrinsic part of their design, but one that fails to translate to the gallery.
A section on Migration and Displacement centres on Lot’s Wife (1992-4), an unfinished photobook begun by Raffles shortly before her death, bravely exhibited here for the first time. Successive proofs from this photobook chart the ‘homecoming’ of Jewish women who, having resettled in Israel after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, reckon with the consequences of uprooting their lives only to find themselves in an equally contested territory, having surrendered their professional careers and, in many cases, their rights. Two realities claim these women at the same time. As the lives of Palestinian people continue to be violated, their words and images resound with the painful impossibility of ever looking back.
Photography, Activism, Campaign Works offers an expansive overview of Franki Raffles photographs without forgetting their social function, using the gallery as means to democratically facilitate an archival encounter. While this exhibition successfully attributes the gestures and alliances that facilitated the making of these photographs, their future is ultimately in the hands of the audiences who view them.
Rachel Boyd is a PhD researcher based at Northumbria University.
Franki Raffles: Photography, Activism, Campaign Works at Baltic Centre For Contemporary Art runs until 16 March 2025.
This review is supported by Baltic Centre For Contemporary Art.
Published 23.07.2024 by Lesley Guy in Reviews
1,291 words