Franki Raffles and Joanne Coates review – studies of women and class show how little things have changed | Photography

Tthe fact that Frankie Raffles is so little known is a travesty. The Jewish, Marxist, lesbian, feminist photographer worked for just over a decade until she died in 1994, aged 39, while giving birth to twin daughters. At the time, she turned her lens with brilliant fervor on women, portraying them as tough, resilient agents of change. Raffles’ life, her work and her death speak to the sheer scale of the sacrifices women make and the toil they endure trying to hold a fractured society together.

A new exhibition dedicated to Raffles at the Baltic, Gateshead, is the largest institutional survey of her work to date. The curators – Emma Dean and Baltic’s director, Sarah Munro – examined more than 40,000 negatives and contact sheets in the Raffles archive. As a result, almost none of the 300 photographs in this show have been printed before – Raffles left only a few home-made prints. They offer an unprecedented look at the scope and mission of a photographer who was almost written out of history even as she tried to record it.

The exhibition is precisely timed and depressingly timely, bringing the political parallels between the 1980s and now into sharp, irrefutable focus. The clothes and furnishings may date from the photographs, but the same problems faced by the women photographed by Raffles while working in factories in Tibet or Thatcher’s Scotland, or chopping wood in the USSR, or working in midwifery clinics in Zimbabwe, low wages, insecurity, lack of access to affordable childcare, housing or welfare, domestic violence has barely improved, and in some cases, worsened.

One big difference between Raffles’ time and today, however, is the way she worked. Many of these photographs were commissioned by local authorities to try to make sense of shocking statistics of social inequality to support the women’s movement. Raffles often developed his work with local councilors – the kind of friendship that is hard to imagine today. But it made me wonder what would be possible now if local authorities thought ahead and if mutual trust could be built between artists and authorities?

Photographic projects that were exhibited during Raffles’ lifetime, such as ‘Getting to Know You’ – depicting women at 40 workplaces in Edinburgh – were displayed in swimming pools or leisure and community centres. Raffles did not consider herself an artist, nor her photographs works of art – the display of the exhibition here carefully acknowledges this, showing her images as constellations that gather speed in number, giving a bird’s-eye view of society. Raffles was interested in the interconnectedness of women. She visualized intersectionality long before the term became part of the vernacular; her works find more similarities than differences between the various communities she has worked with.

These parallels are evoked in abundance: the sausages sold by women in the USSR are just like the sausages made by women in Edinburgh; women appear at the camp in Scotland and Russia; babies are born and bounced on the hip and reared in tandem with physical labor. Women rarely stop and pose – they just have too much to do. Raffles caught them doing backbreaking work, axes raised in the air like crucifixes, faces and hands carved with anguish, clothes stained with sweat and blood.

The exhibition presents documents from the poll tax protests in Scotland and the anti-dictatorship protests in Manila side by side. Also included is Raffles’ most famous work, a poster campaign for the charity she co-founded, Zero tolerance, to raise awareness about domestic violence against women and children. The posters are still striking with their bold set and Raffles’ stark black-and-white photographs, word and image subverting victim stereotypes to suggest – as one poster chillingly reads – “anyone, wherever, whenever”.

Another prophetic work that rings with heartbreaking clarity today is Lot’s Wife., project Raffles began in the early 1990s in Israel, before the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, and remained unfinished when she died. It collects testimonies of Jewish women who recently settled in Israel after the fall of the Soviet Union, with photographs from Raffles. The women’s observations widen the opening onto the domestic space where women are forced to grapple with the effects of war and conflict while thinking about the future. “I don’t want my kids to grow up thinking it’s normal to treat other people like that,” confides one woman.

What makes Raffles’ sense of solidarity so compelling, perhaps, is the fact that she not only photographed it, but lived it. When she went on a road trip around the USSR to photograph women at work, she took her family with her – daughter Anna, then eight, and partner Sandy. She talked at length with her subjects and clearly put them at ease. She wasn’t trying—as many protest photographers do now—to make her subjects look sexy or cool. Raffles pulled himself together and just rolled up his sleeves and got to work. But her work remained unfinished. Just as the maxim goes: a woman’s work is never done.

Downstairs, a Joan Coates exhibition tells a tale of class and country. Middle of Somewhere sees photographs hung on pink walls to mimic the movement of a migratory journey, as if moving up and down the contours of an undulating landscape, not unlike the places that appear in her images. Inspired by a visit to Raffles’ archive in St Andrews, Coates embarked on a new work which in many ways continued where Raffles had left off.

Coates set out to tell the stories of a younger generation of women living on low incomes, revisiting remote rural communities in the Orkney Islands and the Yorkshire Dales. Moving between enigmatic portraits and landscapes, Coates rejects the romantic view of rural life; these places are harsh, hostile and sinister. She shows a trade union waving in front of a butcher; a dead rabbit lying on an empty playing field. A lone tombstone on a hill is engraved with “TA-RA”. A note interrupts the perfect pastoral view: “Take your bags of dog shit home.”

In a reclaimed wooden structure built to resemble a rural bus stop, Coates presents a short film cutting together archival and new footage, with audio narrations from young women she has photographed. They talk about the insecurity and poverty in their communities, about the threat of the climate crisis. These are pressing concerns for the next generation living in the UK – concerns that previous generations did not have to face. The exhibition builds to a climax, with two portraits of two of the young subjects with their backs to the camera, contemplating the landscapes they grew up in but may soon be forced to leave.