From Local to Global: Feminist Activism and Documentary Photography
This panel aims to gather scholars, artists, curators and activists to shed fresh light on researching, archiving, exhibiting and disseminating feminist photography, provoking reassessment and revalidation of feminist social documentary work since the 1970s in its local, transnational and global contexts. While the power imbalances of documentary photography have been rigorously critiqued since this decade, many feminist practitioners have remained invested in the social and activist capacities of the documentary form. This panel seeks to build on ongoing reassessment of documentary photography in relation to intersectional feminist debates and transnational frameworks. It particularly welcomes papers which investigate the relevance of feminist documentary practice to contemporary transnational struggles and questions of solidarity; gendered inequalities and divisions of labour; systems of support and regulation; cultural and ethnic diversity; LGBTQ+ activism; and women’s interregional connections and disparities.
This panel follows on from the major exhibition in Newcastle at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art Franki Raffles: Photography, Activism, Campaign Works (2024-25). From her base in Edinburgh, Raffles pursued projects in China, the Philippines, Tibet, Israel, Palestine, Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic, addressing women’s working conditions, pay, health, care, housing, disability and education. Alongside research papers, the panel will include a roundtable discussion, and two Ignite talks led by artists and activists engaging with documentary practice, including but not limited to the issues addressed by Raffles’ work.
Session Convenor:
Vivian K. Sheng, The University of Hong Kong
Speakers:
Jenny Brownrigg, The Glasgow School of Art
Exhibiting feminist photography: the work of Sandra George (1957-2013) and Franki Raffles (1955-94)
How can a curatorial ‘context sensitive’ (Lind, M, 2010) appraisal of Sandra George’s and Franki Raffles’ photography draw out their process, methods, aims and message through exhibition-making?
This paper explores the curatorial methodologies of two exhibitions (Sandra George, Glasgow International, 5 Florence Street, 2024) and Franki Raffles (Franki Raffles: Observing Women at Work, Reid Gallery, The Glasgow School of Art, 2017). Both photographers, based in Edinburgh, contribute to the histories of social documentary photography in Scotland and the UK. Both George’s and Raffles’ work had been missing from feminist art history discourse. Whilst Raffles’ work since 2017 has been increasingly platformed (Franki Raffles: Photography, Activism, Campaign Works, 2024, Baltic; ‘Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990’, 2024, Tate Britain/National Galleries of Scotland), George’s work, held by Craigmillar Now, has been shown in key community buildings in the Craigmillar, Edinburgh, then as part of Glasgow International 2024, at 5 Florence Street.
Born in Nottingham, George lived the first seven years of her life in Jamaica with her mother, before moving to Birmingham, and then Edinburgh, to live with her father. Sandra George was a community worker in Craigmillar, Edinburgh. She was a prolific social-documentary photographer, taking thousands of images of community projects across Scotland between the late 1980s through to the late 2000s. Franki Raffles (1955–94) was a British feminist social documentary photographer based in Edinburgh, who documented women’s working lives in Scotland and internationally in the 1980s to 1990s.
Lucy MacKenzie Howie, University of St Andrews
Disability/Gender/Labour: Feminist Documentary in 1980s-1990s Scotland
This paper brings together the work of two Edinburgh-based photographers – Franki Raffles and Sandra George – to address where socialist-feminist documentary and community photography practices engaged with disability rights activism and gendered labour politics in 1980s-1990s Scotland.
Analysing the pair’s projects in healthcare and communal living settings, and projects which utilised educational workshop models with disabled people, I will investigate the ways that their collaborative photography methods coincided with the emergence of the social model of disability, interdependency, and social justice. I argue that George and Raffles attempted to redress pervasive power dynamics between photographer and subject, where feminist debates on the ‘male gaze’ and critiques of documentary, turned to parallel discussions on the able-bodied ‘stare’.
Following Rosemarie Garland-Thompson argument that disability studies has transformed feminist analyses of care relations and bodily difference, and Marta Russell’s contention that disability is a “socially created category derived from labour relations”, I will highlight where George and Raffles’ disability activism was interconnected with their social justice projects on housing, gendered labour, anti-racism, and gender-based violence. Notably, George’s photographs that document the working lives of the Edinburgh BlindCraft Bed Factory’s disabled employees, and Raffles’ work for the Lothian Health Campaign which documents gendered labour in hospitals underscore where the representation of class, labour, disability, and health intersect in their practices.
Alicia Bruce, Edinburgh College of Art, The University of Edinburgh
Violence Unseen, Collaborative Campaign Photography for Zero Tolerance
This Zero Tolerance ‘Violence Unseen’ campaign is important to me both personally and politically. As a mother of a young daughter, I want her to grow up in a world of gender equality and zero tolerance of violence against women. I was at primary school when the original campaign was launched. Almost three decades later, I made this series in collaboration with women from all walks of life. The images I made are in the spirit of Franki Raffles’ photographs from the original campaign which drove home the message that women and girls from all backgrounds could be subject to abuse. This series shows that men’s violence against women is not a private domestic matter, it’s a human rights issue. Women are attacked verbally, physically, professionally at all levels, in person and online, both directly and indirectly. Ending violence against women should be everyone’s priority. Complacency on this issue is an endorsement of the unacceptable status quo. Attention to detail and symbolism were important in the composition of each image. Each woman involved in the project worked in collaboration with me to make their photographic image tell a story by adding elements that are important to them culturally and personally, including the choice of settings, gestures and iconography. We made images reflecting the women’s daily lives in their homes, workplaces or leisure spaces. The project and collaborations developed through in-depth research, focus groups and extensive conversations, with all participants having a key role in the development of the images.
Natassa Philimonos, The University of Edinburgh
A Marxist-Leninist Woman Photographer: Critical Realism and Class Politics in Franki Raffles’s Lot’s Wife
Franki Raffles was a woman photographer interested in the lives and labour of women across the globe. She was also, as her estate clarifies, a ‘firmly committed Marxist-Leninist’. This makes Raffles a very different woman photographer in the 1980s: unlike the uses of the camera by artist-photographers to enact a masquerade or and even to reveal the ideological construction and instability of the self, Raffles persisted with the camera as a witnessing/documenting device. Raffles’ ‘feminism’ seemed to refer to women in front of the camera and their social settings in a global context, well before ‘globalisation’ became a buzzword. Across the medium (photography) and the subject-in-the-world (women’s lives and labour), we can begin to think about a Marxist feminist photographic practice—one, moreover, that curiously existed at the heart of postmodernism’s cultural dominance and anti-Marxism. The paper will draw on archival research I undertook in 2015 to reconstruct Raffles’s last and incomplete project Lot’s Wife (1992-4), which documents the ‘domestication’ of nine Russian Jewish women who migrated to Israel after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. My analysis suggests that Lot’s Wife deftly ‘records’ what appears in front of her camera and, at the same time, employs the devices of critical realism in order to situate the ‘local’ in the social totality of globalised capitalism. I suggest that Raffles’s enduring commitment to Marxism-Leninism ‘guarded’ her work from the postmodernist uses of the lens—typical amongst her contemporary feminist photographers. In that regard, I am interested in locating Raffles’s efforts toward a critical realism and in how this can be negotiated into a Marxist-feminist photo-history from below.
Yanru Dong, University of St Andrews
Documenting Women’s Labour in the Space of Urban Village: Franki Raffles’s Chinese Working Women Series, 1984 to 1991
This paper examines Franki Raffles’s photographic series on Chinese female labourers. In the context of globalization, Chinese women have seen their identities transform, shifting from manual labourers and traditional homemakers to transnational salespersons, influenced by daily production, policy shifts, and global product circulation. Current scholarship overlooks Raffles’s contributions to transnational feminism in Chinese women’s photography and her socialist beliefs. The aim is to reposition Raffles’s work within the frameworks of feminism and documentary photography, highlighting her collective artistic intent and how she uses photography to elevate political consciousness and economically empower women. This study integrates photographic archives sourced from the University of St Andrews Photographic Museum alongside interviews with Sandy Lunan and Alistair Scott. The archive collection titled ‘Trip to Eastern Europe and Asia’ spans from June 1984 to February 1985, documenting Raffles’ travels in mainland China and Tibet in contact sheets. Other images depicting Chinese immigrant women labourers are preserved in the collections ‘To Let You Understand’ and ‘International Women’s Day Celebrations in Scotland,’ covering the period from 1988 to 1991. This analysis will focus on three aspects of Chinese women’s labour as captured by Raffles: urban village spaces and travel paths, street poster representations, and works undertaken by women with immigrant identities. I argue that Raffles’s transnational feminism intertwines with themes of embodiment, labour reproduction, and class rights. Raffles enhances the visibility of Chinese female labourers, thereby repositioning women-led labour as a means of economic empowerment and creative expression for female workers.