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

★★★★☆ / ★★★★★
Baltic, Gateshead
Two exhibitions – one by a Marxist, lesbian, feminist active in the 80s and the other by a modern working-class artist – reveal the intersectionality of the female experience across space and time

The fact that Franki 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. In that time she trained her lens, with brilliant fervour, on women, portraying them as gritty, resilient agents of change. Raffles’ life, her work, and her death all speak to the sheer scale of sacrifices women make and the labour they endure in trying to hold a fractured society together.

A new exhibition devoted 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 – combed through more than 40,000 negatives and contact sheets in Raffles’ archive. As a result, almost none of the 300 photographs in this show have been printed before – Raffles only left a few homemade prints. They offer an unprecedented view into the scope and mission of a photographer who was almost written out of history, even as she tried to record it.

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