GLASGOW.- From 4 March until 27 April 2017 the Reid Gallery at The Glasgow School of Art will host an exhibition of work by acclaimed feminist social documentary photographer, Franki Raffles (1955-94). Observing Women at Work presents a selection of black and white photographs and material by Franki Raffles from three bodies of work: To Let You Understand (1987-88), Women Workers in the USSR (1984/1989), and material from the first Zero Tolerance campaign (1992), entitled Prevalence.

Zero Tolerance was a charity established by Franki Raffles and Evelyn Gillan, together with a small group of women who came together through working on Edinburgh District Council Women’s Committee projects in the late 1980s. It was developed as a ground-breaking campaign to raise awareness of the issue of men’s violence against women and children.

Raffles’ work will also be contextualised in this exhibition with works of other key photographers including Margaret Fay Shaw [1903-2004], Helen Muspratt [1907-2001] and The Hackney Flashers, a collective set up in 1974 by Jo Spence with Neil Martinson.

The exhibition is curated by The Glasgow School of Art’s Exhibitions Director, Jenny Brownrigg, produced in partnership with Dr Alistair Scott, Edinburgh Napier University who established The Franki Raffles Archive http://www.frankirafflesarchive.org/; and with University of St Andrews Special Collections and Zero Tolerance. A publication will accompany the exhibition.

“This exhibition presents a significant view into Raffles’ practice,” says Jenny Brownrigg. “Her work contributes much to the canon of photography in Scotland, uniquely capturing a breadth of workplaces from Soviet State Farms to an Edinburgh laundry and most importantly, the women who work in them. Raffles’ gives these women an independent voice. Her bold, visually arresting style captures the workplace and reminds us of social issues that are still pertinent today regarding equality of pay and equal rights in the workplace”.

“Raffles’ photographic practice has been virtually forgotten in the twenty years since her early death,” adds Alastair Scott. “This exhibition will help give her photographs a new life, and will enable critics and the public, to start to properly evaluate the legacy of her committed feminist social documentary practice”

To Let You Understand
This ‘is a continuation of Raffles focus on women’s work. This year long project was initiated by Edinburgh District Council Women’s Committee. The aim was to document working women’s lives in Edinburgh, informed by statistical information about pay and conditions collected by the Women’s Unit. The women are home helps, cleaners, factory workers, hospital workers. The environments include Hewlett Packard (both office and assembly areas), Miller’s Sweets, Burntons Biscuits, cleaners at the George Hotel and in the grand offices of Edinburgh District Council and at a laundry.

Women Workers in the USSR
This is an extensive series of photographs Raffles took on a trip to Russia in 1989, capturing women at work in both rural and urban places. On a state farm one woman tells Raffles: ‘It’s a big farm. No-one knows how big it is. It takes up to three days to ride from one side to the other on horseback’. The photographs show women working in the fields, tending to the cows; then in the city working in manufacturing, in a saw mill, a bottle plant and even making a piano. The women, under the then soviet system also took on men’s jobs, so Raffles photographs women plasterers, road builders and a railway worker. Raffles’ caption, going with two women road builders in conversation with her about the life of women in the UK states: ‘One says, “You have people called housewives don’t you?”’

Zero Tolerance
This was a ground-breaking campaign and charity established by Raffles and Evelyn Gillan, together with a small group of women who came together through working on Edinburgh District Council Women’s Committee projects in the late 1980s’. Raffles photographs for the campaign represented a new approach. Rather than girls and women represented as victims, they were portrayed in familiar, ordinary domestic settings. These images were juxtaposed with stark facts on domestic violence such as ‘By the time they reach eighteen, one of them will have been subjected to sexual abuse’. Zero Tolerance is now in its 25th year. They are currently, after working since 1992 with the original identity, have an open call for a new artist to work with them on the next campaign.

Helen Muspratt, Margaret Fay Shaw and the Hackney Flashers
In a fourth section of the exhibition, Raffles work will be shown alongside other women photographers. Helen Muspratt, who had originally been encouraged to take up photography by retired Glasgow School of Art’s Director Fra Newbery, took photographs of women workers in Russia, fifty years earlier than Raffles, on her 6-week trip to the Soviet Union in 1936.

A work from Raffles’ project ‘Lewis Women’, will be shown alongside a Margaret Fay Shaw photograph. Shaw lived for five years in the early 1930s with the sisters Mairi and Peigi MacRae on South Uist, documenting them at work and at rest.
Bringing it up to the decade before Raffles work on women, we will also show her work beside ‘The Hackney Flashers’, who commissioned by Hackney Trades Council, documented women’s working conditions in the 1970s.