Skip to main content

Franki Raffles

Gallery Malmo, Edinburgh

 Franki Raffles would have fitted in well with the soon to be demolished former supermarket in North Edinburgh currently showing a small selection of her photographs. Since 2018, the space has been where the DIY-run Gallery Malmo has called home, and is the sort of roughshod space that Salford born Raffles might well have scrutinised with her lens, especially if were filled with the communal life of women at work.

 

In her short life, Raffles became best known for her images illustrating Zero Tolerance, the then Edinburgh District Council’s 1992 campaign that laid bare the uncomfortable truths of male violence against women. The Zero Tolerance charity, co-founded by Raffles with Evelyn Gillan and others from EDC’s Women’s Committee, continues its work today.

 

In the decade prior to the campaign, Raffles developed a practice that took her from the Isle of Lewis to Zimbabwe, the then Soviet Union, China and Tibet, her images documenting the everyday lives of women across the world. After moving to Edinburgh in the mid 1980s, Raffles’ work was similarly rooted in a sense of community that continued up to her untimely death in 1994 aged thirty-nine.

 

The eight images presented at Gallery Malmo are drawn from two projects; We Can Take Pictures(1983-1985); and Photographers with Special Needs(1983-1985). Both sets capture a sense of wonder felt by the children in the pictures as they explore the photographic process in a workshop situation. On a stool in the container where the pictures are displayed sits an original copy of We Can Take Pictures(1985), an instructive publication explaining the rudiments of photography in an enthusiastically accessible manner accompanied by Raffles’ images.

 

This reveals several layers to the images that go beyond documentation of the event itself to show off portraits of young lives in motion. This is delivered with a warmth and joie de vivre that shines through all of Raffles’ work. Seen several decades on from when the photographs were taken, it is also a glimpse back at a pre digital age when such insight was given the resources to thrive.

 

Raffles’ work has previously been seen at Glasgow School of Art’s Observing Women at Work(2017) exhibition, presented in association with Edinburgh Napier University’s Franki Raffles Archive Project. More recently, images by Raffles were included alongside work by Margaret Salmon in Home Economics(2021) at Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art. 

 

With Raffles’ substantial archive held by the University of St. Andrews Library’s Special Collections Division, this show is an evocative taster of a vital body of work that requires to be given its dues with a major retrospective.

 

 

The Franki Raffles exhibition at Gallery Malmo can be viewed by appointment until 29thJanuary. Contact info@gallerymalmo.uk to arrange. The Franki Raffles Archive can be found at www.frankirafflesarchive.org. The Franki Raffles Photography Collection is at 
https://collections.st-andrews.ac.uk/photographs/collection/franki-raffles-photography-collection/555035

 

 Scottish Art News, January 2023


ends

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug...
2 comments
Read more

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h...
Post a Comment
Read more