Shedding Light – Photography and Women’s Movements: Staging, Activism, Preservation

The work of Franki Raffles (1955–1994) combines photographic documentation of the working lives and lived realities of women with concrete activist positions. After her death, Raffles’ family kept her photographs safe for 20 years until they could be deposited at an archive and be made available to researchers and curators. Using Raffles’ story as a starting point, we invited four experts to discuss the visual history of women’s movements in Germany with a focus on photography as a feminist practice, mode of self-representation, and form of political strategy. We will address how photographs from these contexts are made visible and how. What pictures make it into archives or even into museums? And which remain hidden? 
 
A cooperation between the Digital German Women’s Archive and the Museum of Work. 

Tamara Block is a historian currently working on the “Survey and Digitalisation of the Collection” project at the Archive of the German Women’s Movement in Kassel. Her research interests are communication in the First World War and the history of photography. 
 
Sévérine Kpoti is a freelance photographer, concert organiser, and (sub)culture activist based in Freiburg. She has been documenting social and societal structures and subcultures with a focus on queer feminist and BIPOC issues, networks, and communities since 2018. In this context she has staged several events with feminist history workshops and archives. 
 
Klara Niemann is an art historian and curator based in Cologne. For a project undertaken across art museums in North Rhine-Westphalia, she conducted research on the estate of photographer Angela Neuke (1943–1997), with the aim of completing a first comprehensive survey of its contents and developing initial strategies for later access and engagement. 
 
Nietze is a freelance photographer based in Leipzig who dedicates her documentary and artistic works to societally relevant topics that are too often overlooked. Her long-term documentary project “Hidden Heroes” advocates for visibility and public education around endometriosis and adenomyosis. 

Register online:  

shmh.de/programm/