Moving pictures

If you'd asked Franki Raffles to describe herself, I suspect she'd have said "activist" first and "photographer" second. The current exhibition at the Baltic in Gateshead - Photography, Activism, Campaign Works - underlines that, for her, photography was primarily a means to an end rather than an end in itself, and the camera was just one of the tools of the activist's trade.

This isn't to do a disservice to her abilities as an artist, just to recognise that her artistry was directed towards serving more than a merely aesthetic function. This is most obvious in the work for which she's arguably best known, the anti-violence against women campaign Zero Tolerance, but also in the images that expose the appalling housing conditions endured by hundreds of thousands of people in the 1980s - a grim echo of Nick Hedges' work for Shelter less than two decades earlier. Like Graham MacIndoe, she captured the realities of Edinburgh, a world away from the picture-postcard portrayals.

Reviewing David Hurn's most recent show at the Workers' Gallery, I noted his focus on people engaged in activity rather than posing for the camera. Raffles was also interested in depicting doers rather than talkers. Her photos from Russia show women hard at work in factories and fields, cheerfully contributing their labour to the collective cause and attaining a degree of recognition and empowerment as a result - in contrast to women in the West, for whom work is depicted as a relentless, dehumanising grind and something that reaps no personal rewards.

Raffles wasn't simply interested in using her images to speak on behalf of others, though. For her project focusing on Jewish women who had emigrated from Russia to Israel, she not only took portraits but also recorded their own words to display alongside. It's an approach also adopted by the likes of Jim Mortram and Paul Sng, one that affords respect to people who are so often denied it.

Also on view at the Baltic is Joanne Coates' Middle Of Somewhere. Coates' star has been rising for some time, and it's not hard to see why she's won the 2024 Vasseur Baltic Artists' Award, been named as the official Election Artist and been handed a solo exhibition in a gallery with considerable profile regionally and nationally.

Coates' countryside vistas often hold conventional aesthetic appeal, but importantly (perhaps because she also works on a farm) she is not so much a landscape photographer as someone who photographs landscapes while remaining acutely aware that they are almost always at least partially manmade. Like Raffles, her real focus is on people, on personal narratives and struggles. There is a beauty but also a bleakness; rural life is routinely romanticised from the outside, but the reality is often challenging and isolating, requiring considerable resilience of those who continue to (attempt to) make a living off the land.

Middle Of Somewhere picks up the broad themes explored in her other projects such as Daughters Of The Soil, and indeed in Raffles' work: gender, labour, class. With regard to the latter, one image is particularly key, Coates looking down both literally and metaphorically on an enormous country pile that dominates the landscape.

Ultimately, the human subjects of Coates' images are enduring a precarious present characterised by "housing shortages, second home owners, wealthy folk moving to the countryside, lack of jobs, schools closing, post office closing, pubs closing etc" and facing an increasingly uncertain future beneath the shadow of ecological meltdown and climate change. She may not weaponise her camera quite as blatantly as Raffles, but she shares a commitment to spotlighting critical social issues with a view to provoking debate and prompting change.