Franki Raffles Audio Description Script

Welcome to the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art and this audio description of the Franki Raffles exhibition in the Northumbria University Gallery on Level 3.

Stepping out of the lift on Level 3 we enter the space outside the Northumbria University Gallery.  Here, there is 10-foot-wide wall in front of the entrance that is open for access on the left and right.  The wall stretches from floor to ceiling and is covered in a wallpaper of images from a contact sheet. The thumbnail images are from rolls of film that are arranged in six horizontal strips.  The images have been blown up in size to cover the whole wall. The film cells are shots of women in the USSR working in the fields. Under some of the frames, you can see biro marks where the artist, Franki Raffles has selected frames to enlarge.

On the left-hand side of the entrance is the title of the exhibition in black letters on a light green wall-

Franki Raffles

Photography, Activism, Campaign Works

11 May 2024 - 16 March 2025

Stepping through the entrance doorway we arrive in a large, dimly lit space, with collections of photographs displayed in groups that cover the many projects that Franki Raffles tackled during her career, illuminated by spotlights. 

The photographs in the exhibition are black and white except for a wall of colour further down the gallery.  Some are arranged in black frames and others without frames, printed on Dibond (aluminium composite).

The walls around the gallery are a light green colour and the dividing walls across the gallery are off-white.  The exhibition is divided into three sections.

Introduction

Straight ahead from the entrance is a 25 feet wide, white wall. There’s a 3-meter-wide gap at either side leading to the rest of the exhibition.  On the left half of the wall is an introduction to the exhibition in black letters titled- 

Franki Raffles

Photography, Activism, Campaign Works

Underneath is a summary of her work between 1984 to when she died in 1994 with the information that-

‘This exhibition is the first major retrospective exhibition of Raffles’ work bringing together around 300 photographs, all printed from the original negatives and transparencies, alongside archive material contextualising her work.’

On the right half of the wall, near the centre, is a photograph of a young Franki Raffles.  Hung at shoulder level the A4 picture is a head to waist, black and white photograph in a black frame.  She stands in a housing estate with a row of houses behind. Her dark wavy hair falls around her shoulders.  Franki wears a long black coat open to reveal a pale jumper. 

To the right of the photograph, printed on the wall, is a statement by Franki about her work-

I have chosen to work as a photographer because I hope that through my photographs people will see and learn about the reality of life for women and question and press for change and improvement.

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We will explore the exhibition in a clockwise direction, I will include context from the information posters that hang alongside the groups of photographs.

There is a block of nine black and white photos on the entrance wall, directly to the left of the doorway, entitled - 

Lewis

INTRO NOTE: ‘After graduating from St Andrews University in 1978, Raffles moved to the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland, where she renovated a derelict farmhouse. It was in Lewis that she began to view photography as a tool of social activism and engagement with her wider community.’

Raffles photographs are of local women engaged in traditional crofting and fish processing work.  The photos are in horizontal frames arranged in a rectangle of 9 pictures. The photos show;

A young child zipped up in an anorak beside her mum who squats to inspect a sheep’s fleece, whilst shearing goes on around her.

A woman in a dark overall, her hair pinned back with a scarf, kneels clipping the fleece off a sheep with hand-shears.

A group of women tackle a pile of peat squares.  A half full trailer and small tractor stand by.

The back of the full trailer rattles away up a muddy track, heading towards a road that cuts across the low-lying peatlands of Lewis from left to right.

There is a portrait of an old lady in her front room and women working in a factory.  A young woman works on a loom inside a house keeping her parker coat on.

The last photo shows a young woman dressed in a jumper, trousers and wellies standing in the front doorway of a stone cottage.  Some of the windows are blocked out with plywood, the paint on the front door is peeling. 

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USSR

Moving around the corner we follow the left-hand wall where we pass into the middle section of the gallery.  Here there is a collage of over 100 unframed A5, A4, and A3 sized prints, all taken in the USSR.  These are arranged in a flowing pattern down to the next dividing wall. 

The USSR women are portrayed in a hugevariety of occupations.

Farming; the women pour swill into pigs' troughs, hand-milk cows, push through waist-high foliage picking vegetables into metal buckets. They cut the grass with long scythes and pitchfork hay into tall stacks. The women sell fruit from huge wicker baskets in the market. 

A woman on a railway line slams the track with a sledgehammer, women with long handled shovels lay roads. Another mixes cement to lay bricks, her hair tied up in a headscarf.  Two women plaster walls.

Women bend over boots in a boot factory and tie up sausages in a sausage factory. They operate knitting machines, sewing machines, and stir vast pots in a huge kitchen. They mop the floor, stack shelves, sort laundry. 

There are children at school sitting behind desks and gathered in the playground.

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The centre of the gallery in this middle section is given over to a

Reading Room

This is a square area set out with a large table and chairs where visitors can stop and peruse books relevant to the exhibition. The room is divided from the exhibition space on both sides by dark-stained wood panels fixed to black metal poles that run floor to ceiling. The space is open to enter around the sides of these dividing panels.

Both sides of the wood panels are used to pin up information concerning the exhibition. 

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USSR display case and panel

Outside of the reading room, opposite the USSR wall, five posters are pinned to the wood panels, alongside a display case.

In the case are a collection of archival materials from Raffles 1989 journey to the USSR with her daughter Anna.  Pages from Franki’s diary and her daughters red hardback journal are displayed along with tickets and hotel key cards and a bundle of Russian road maps.  There is also a letter to Raffles about an exhibition enquiry.

The posters above, feature photographs from the USSR, printed on a white background. Underneath the photographs are text captions of comments the women made to Raffles – in example-

In a vast field between high hills, three women pause from stacking hay to pose for the camera.  They wear flowery, house-coat overalls, down almost to their ankles. Their feet are buried in the loose hay.

Two women stand beside a stook of hay, clutching their four-tined pitchforks, one smiles, the other purses her lips.  In the foreground a woman leans on her pitchfork with her hands under her chin. Her head is slightly cocked to one side, her eyes creased almost shut in a craggy featured face.  She says to Franki,

It’s the women who work hard in the Soviet Union. Men do nothing.

I don’t know why we waste time on them.

State Farm, Russia, 1989

There is another photograph from this series of a man sitting on the back of a horse as it grazes and the women dig in with their pitchforks. 

In another photograph a man hangs around in the back of a wagon with his hands on his hips, waiting for the women to dig up and bring the potatoes.

In the foreground a portly woman stands holding a metal bucket with her other hand on her hip as she gazes at Franki.

She said ‘Why don’t you come over

and live here. I could get you a job no

problem.’ I said ‘I’ve got a job already.’

She said ‘Yeah, taking photographs of me.’

Potato lifting, State Farm, Caucasus

Two women stand on a pile of rubble, posing for the camera.  They hold long, flat shovels with their backs against a white breeze-block wall.  The women are both stoutly built and wear short-sleeved, flower print dresses, with bare legs and slip on shoes.  Their hair is tied up in white headscarves.  The shovels they hold have wooden, curved shafts that taper up to a point above their heads, like branches smoothed, straight from the tree.

The woman on our left has a dark print dress. She holds her shovel close to her right side like a sentry as she stands on one leg, her right leg bent up against the wall has disappeared under her flowing skirt.  She grins into the camera with her other hand on her hip.  Her friend holds the top of her shovel, with her other arm at her side.  She smiles with her mouth turned down. She has a light-coloured dress and wears her headscarf like a turban.

Two women who have built over 100km of roads together. One says ‘You have people called housewives don’t you?’ 

Road builders, Caucasus,  Russia, 1989

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Moving down to the left from the posters we reach the wall that ends the middle section of the exhibition. 

Here there is a long double line of large, framed colour photographs titled 

‘Solidarity and Sisterhood’ 

INTRO NOTE: ‘Raffles believed that despite their different geographies and political systems, women around the world could unite through their shared experiences of work and family care. In 1984, she spent twelve months travelling in Russia, China, Tibet, Nepal, India, Hong Kong and the Philippines meeting and photographing women at work and in their communities’

The photographs show a vast array of people in different environments going about their daily lives, working, performing ceremonies, playing music. There are the colours of costumes, clothing, and surrounding landscapes.

A woman walks two black and white cows past houses on a grey dusty street with two black shaggy dogs at her heels.

A band of girl drummers stand in lines and beat long drumsticks on round wide drums. 

Women spin silk in long white threads. 

In the market women stand behind a long pile of pale green cabbages displayed on a stone table.  A woman cuts into one with a small sharp knife. 

Smoke from a campfire rises from a distant circle of yurts in the middle of a vast plain between mountains. 

Girls in blue costumes. One holds a teapot. Young people in white robes kneel behind.

A man and woman walk up a street on flattened snow.Other people mill on the street behind them.  The man wears a fur lined coat that wraps around him. He clutches a rolled-up sack and carries a long dark package across his back.  The diminutive old woman is dressed in a long black coat and a creamy brown fur hat.  She carries a huge stack of bundled rushes across her back, piled several feet above her head.The bundles are tied with white rope up the centre and then strapped around her shoulders; with her hands in her pockets she leans into the weight of the bundle. 

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On the left side is an open doorway into the lower section of the exhibition. Through this doorway is a display at the bottom of the gallery titled

‘Disability, Photography and Social Practice’

INTRO NOTE: ‘From the early 1980s Raffles initiated several projects using

photography as a tool of empowerment for people with disabilities,

enabling a new means of communication and expression.’ 

Eight unframed dibond black and white photographs are arranged in two blocks.  A tabletop display case is set against the wall under the photographs.

The first block of photos shows posters displayed on billboards along Edinburgh’s Princes Street in 1992. The posters challenged the attitudes shown towards disabled people. 

Black and white photographs of disabled individuals are printed alongside single word descriptions-  ‘Redundant , Sexless, Powerless’.

The second block of photos show children being taught to use a camera and holding Polaroid prints enjoying the results of their work. 

Lying open behind the glass of the display case amongst letters and notebooks is a printed book entitled

We Can Take Pictures (1983) 

The book records Raffles work with children using photography.

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To the right of the doorway, along the white wall, ten picture frames each measuring 36 x 20inch are hung in a long line.   This section is titled-

Lot's Wife.

We learn from the information poster that- One of Raffles’ final projects was titled Lot’s Wife, from the Biblical story of the woman who was turned into a pillar of salt by God for the crime of looking back.

Visiting Israel between 1992–94 she produced a series of images documenting the lives of Soviet Jewish women who had emigrated there after the collapse of the USSR in 1991.

Each frame contains two pages torn from a book telling the stories of nine different women in a collage of words and pictures.  A portrait of each woman in her new home fills the centre of each first page. 

Four smaller photos run across the middle of both pages, one beside the portrait and three more across the second page.  There is a paragraph of words above the first small photo and then a strip of words runs down the centre of the second page above and below the horizontal photographs forming a cross shape. 

In the first frame we reach, beside the doorway, is the story of Sofya.

In the large portrait photo Sofya sits on a white plastic stool pushed against the wall inside her home. She gazes into the camera posed with her three daughters around her. They all have the same wavy black hair, Sofya has hers tied neatly back at the nape of her neck. 

Beside her left shoulder there’s an alcove with kitchen cabinets on the far wall. She holds her arm around her young daughter, who clutches her mother’s leg.  Two slightly older daughters stand behind just inside the alcove, also looking into the camera.

The girls wear cotton dresses and Sofya has a loose-fitting stripy shirt and jeans. 

The walls are bare, and the floor is a tile-patterned lino.  Against the wall to the right is a TV with aerial that stands on a black trolley.In the alcove behind the girls, a square patch of sunlight falls through an unseen window onto the kitchen wall.

The four smaller photos show snatches of their life outside. 

There is a flight of four steps leads up to a door in a long row of prefab buildings. A pram is tucked into the corner by the steps. A wide dusty road runs past the front door and into the bare hills beyond.

There is a machine gun is propped against the side of a pebble dash wall in a backyard. 

There is a wall is filled with posters with photos and graffiti 

In the text Sofya tells how hard it was to leave Uzbekhistan. She did it for the children. Sofya states ‘that many Russians are afraid of the Arabs… they don’t want the Arabs here because they are afraid; I am ashamed of them for this…but the Israelis they know (that the Arabs should be afraid of us) and still some think like this.’

Sofya ends her account with these words- ‘How Jews can do the things they do here I don't understand. They have the worst experience in the world and they want to do the same. Of course I hate terrorism, but I hate Jewish terrorism too… I don't want my children to grow up thinking it is alright to treat other people like this.’

The account opens with a quote from the Bible- is it a light thing to the House of Judah that they commit the abominations which they commit here? For they have filled the land with violence and have returned to provoke me to anger.

The stories from each woman continue in the other frames.

Raffles notes in her diary of this time in Israel that: ‘Omnipresent (is) the mistaken belief that normal life can continue in the shadow of a gun.’

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Directly opposite the Lots Wife wall is a large alcove at the bottom of the gallery where a project titled Zero Tolerance is displayed. 

The walls inside the alcove are painted a dark charcoal grey. 

On first view the bottom wall grabs attention with the striking image of six large posters illuminated by spotlights. 

Entering the alcove there is an information poster on the left that starts with the words-

‘During her lifetime, the work that Raffles was best-known for was the groundbreaking Zero Tolerance campaign launched in December 1992 to raise awareness of male violence against women and children.’

Moving down, on the left-hand wall there are six A2 size black posters with white text, above two display cases that contain archive newspaper articles. 

The words on the posters are drawn from research that included interviews with young men in Edinburgh High Schools. The text includes- 

Drunk or sober there is never an excuse

what's love got to do with it. Violence against women and children, there is no excuse

Blame the woman, blame the drink, blame the weather. Domestic violence, there is no excuse.

The white letters stand out starkly against the black background.  A capital Z dominates the space between the words at the top and bottom of the poster.

Moving to the six posters on the bottom wall, each are 60 x 40 inches. Two are text only- one poster is white text on a black background, the other is black on white.  In the top half of each poster, in a pyramid shape in capital letters, are the words, ‘No Man Has The Right’. A capital Z fills the bottom half of each poster with the words ‘zero tolerance’ running underneath.

The four remaining posters surround the text posters.

Raffle’s photographs cover the top half of each poster.Black and white tableaux images of women and girls are surrounded by punchy text messages.

A grandma sits reading to her little granddaughter, above and below the words ‘From three to ninety-three, women are raped.’

A woman lounges on an Indian rug in front of an open fire, ‘She lives with a successful businessman, last week he hospitalised her.’ 

Three young women chat together in a living room,’ When they say no, they mean no, Some men don’t listen’.  Below the Z at the bottom of the posters is further messaging, on this one it is- ‘Whoever, wherever, whenever, male abuse of power is a crime’.

Moving to the wall on the right of these posters, there’s a collage of seven, large unframed photos pasted on the wall. 

The group of photos are pasted in a double row and show the Z posters in situ on billboards in Edinburgh and on the side of a double decker bus and on a bus shelter. 

One photograph is of a poster of a scantily clad woman on a billboard advertising a bra.  In large letters she declares ‘Hello Boys’.  The poster has been graffitied.  A cross has been attached to the O in hello to make a female symbol and a Z is drawn inside the O of boys. ‘Zero Tolerance’ is graffitied underneath and under the woman’s image is scrawled ‘Go to hell boys’.

To the right of the collage are two framed photographs that show a young woman, Campaigns Officer Evelyn Gillan, who co-founded Zero Tolerance, directing a meeting in the Edinburgh City Chambers.

To the side of these is a video screen the size of a large TV screen where a video clip is relayed (7 and a half minutes long).  The clip is from a BBC Scotland documentary from 2023 ‘The Women who Changed Modern Scotland’ that features Raffles and Gillan and the Zero Tolerance campaign.  There is a wooden bench to sit on whilst the video plays.

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Activism and Protest 

Moving out of the alcove, turning left, we pass six large, framed photos of the Philippines from1984. Huge crowds are gathered to demonstrate against the regime of President Marcos. 

We then turn right to the bottom of the long wall that leads back up to the entrance.  Here we find 13 framed photographs from Scotland. 

The photos show scenes of protest- In the first photo two old ladies stand behind a sign ‘The rich get richer, the pensioner poorer’.Crowds march with banners against the Poll Tax, education cuts, the Standing Charge.

There’s a sign hammered up at the side of a road with the words ‘Rosyth Women’s Peace Camp’.  Beside it a cut out image of a white dove of peace, nailed onto a stake.

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We pass through the doorway to re-enter the middle section with the reading room on our right.  On the wall to the left there is a large collage of 75+ unframed photographs that echoes the USSR wall on the other side of the gallery.  This section is titled-

To Let You Understand 

The introductory notes as we enter the middle section tell us-

‘September 1987 to April 1988, Raffles visited workplaces to

interview and photograph women in shops, factories, offices, hotels,

and hospitals. The women spoke about issues such as low pay, poor

working conditions, and child daycare provision.’

Hospital workers in white coats take x-rays, work in the lab, or sift through a chaotic filing system.  Dinner ladies in overalls serve up food to lines of school children, hairdressers attend their clients. Mob capped factory workers check lines of Jaffa cakes on the way to be covered in chocolate. Two women sort through a small mountain of dead, plucked, chickens, others extrude and tie up sausages in neat strings. Toddlers in pushchairs are lined up on wet concrete outside a windowless, graffitied shop. 

On the boards outside the reading room across to the right, are posters with text captions.

A young woman stands by a conveyer belt with a line of large bottles.  She checks them as they rattle by.  She tells Franki-

‘My mum works here and my aunty.

The pay is good but it is boring.’

LINE WORKER, BOTTLING PLANT, EDINBURGH

Franki Raffles recalls the words of a mother of young children.

‘I don’t miss the job I had that much,

but I miss the women I was working with.

It wouldn’t be so bad if I could take the

kids out more but there’s nowhere round

here and you cannae always afford to

take the bus somewhere else.’

SINGLE MOTHER, MUIRHOUSE, EDINBURGH

The photograph shows two under 5-year-old children zipped up warmly in anoraks and woolly hats, trousers and wellies. They are together on a dirty patch of grass that is strewn with rubbish.  Behind them a dark concrete walkway under a building.  Silhouetted pillars open onto flats in the distance. One child is hunkered down, a stick in one hand and reaching for a piece of flat metal, perhaps off the front of a fire.  The second child watches eagerly, she is clutching a plastic bottle.

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To the left of the posters is an arrangement of framed photos on the partition wall with the title- 

Women Workers

INTRO NOTE:Images of women in non-traditional roles…  reflect the rich diversity of women’s working lives in Scotland at this time…(the late 1980s)

The photographs are framed in three groups across the wall.

Four images from a school staff room, classroom and the cleaners on a break.

The middle group of nine prints include women who work in hospitals- a laboratory, laundry, mopping and polishing floors. nursing.

In the third group of six photographs woman are seen in more unusual jobs.  Running an office, welding, operating a control panel in a factory. Mechanics fixing a motorbike and a washing machine.

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Moving up past the partition wall, we leave the middle section and rejoin the entrance area.  Before we reach the entrance door, we find the final group of photographs titled

Community, Housing, Childcare

INTRO NOTE: ‘Working as a freelance photographer in Edinburgh from the early 1980s, … Raffles worked on exhibitions and publications that looked at issues affecting women’s lives beyond their labour.’

Here we have a montage of 25 mounted and framed, mostly A4, images. 

In the centre an A3 framed, but unmounted, picture stands out against the smaller frames, with. In it, blocks of flats with blank windows rise 20 storeys high.  The flats stand against a grey sky and loom over a broad concrete road and concrete pavement that are empty of cars or people apart from one speck that’s a small child in the middle, sitting on the kerb.  Further inspection reveals a man standing away in the background.  Apart from a handful of trees that grow at the foot of the most distant flats, the child appears alone in a concrete wilderness. In another A3 picture above to the right, three children play surrounded in the shadow of high-rise flats.

Other images tell their own stories.  For instance, Children play outside, a girl halts her bike beside a graffitied wall. A little kid rides an outgrown trike as his friends’ play with a shopping trolley. 

A shot down a steep flight of stairs to a bare concrete floor in a housing block.  The stairs wind upwards and cut across the top of the picture.  At the bottom of the stairwell a woman holds a toddler in her right arm with three bulging carrier bags in her hands as she prepares to climb the stairs. 

This is the end of the audio description.  You can leave the exhibition through the double entrance doors that lead out to the lifts.