Franki Raffles was a feminist social documentary photographer. She studied Philosophy at the University of St Andrews in 1973 and went on to become a self-employed photographer. Her photography projects were mainly community-based charity and campaign work, focusing on issues surrounding women in the workplace and their daily lives. In 1991, Raffles helped to establish the charity Zero Tolerance and ran a photography campaign across the city of Edinburgh to raise awareness of male violence against women.
Tragically, as she was producing such significant photographic work, Raffles died suddenly in 1994 from complications after childbirth. The University of St Andrews Libraries and Museums hold Raffles’ collection in partnership with Edinburgh Napier University and the Raffles Estate.
We have been working in collaboration with the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art on the first major retrospective of Raffles’ photography. The exhibition ‘Franki Raffles: Photography, Activism, Campaign Works’ features projects from 1984-1994, showing women’s lives and women at work in Scotland and across the globe.
The Baltic team visited the collection here at St Andrews a number of times and scoured through vast collection materials for the exhibition. They selected photographs to display from over 40,000 negatives in the Raffles collection. The exhibition is an exciting opportunity to showcase images that may never have been displayed before. The photographs present a common link between women’s lives with themes such as work, cost of living and childcare.
Making digital exhibition prints from film negatives is both very technical and very subjective. It is a delightfully tricky task to match the tone, density and contrast favoured by the photographer, without losing or obscuring information, and without many original finished prints to refer to. We did our best to remain faithful to Raffles’ vision and aesthetic, producing over 400 print-ready files from the final image selection.
The exhibition also features manuscript items from the collection such as notebooks, Zero Tolerance Campaign material, and reports used for research on different projects. These objects add context to Raffles’ work and give insight into her passion for each project; she did extensive research alongside the ‘To Let You Understand’ project and the Zero Tolerance campaign, which emphasises her commitment to the aims of each project she worked on as well as the creation of the photographs.
Another large part of the Raffles collection is the many contact sheets she produced, some of which include her own markings and handwriting. A large contact sheet taken in the Soviet Union is displayed at the entrance of the exhibition.
These contact sheets give insight into Raffles’ process when shooting photographs, showing how she moved around and interacted with the people depicted in them. Her markings tell us her thoughts and her choice of images, giving the archive a sense of Raffles’ own voice.
The show has already received four-star reviews from the Guardian and the Telegraph. Be sure to catch it on display until the 16th of March 2025 at The Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, Newcastle.
Blog written by Lydia Heeley, Assistant Curator, Photographic Collections, and Edward Martin, Assistant Curator, Photographic Collections.