In this first blog about the Raissa Page collection at the Richard Burton Archives, Swansea University, I would like to briefly introduce both myself and the collection. My name is David Johnston-Smith, and I have been working here as Project Archivist since the fifth of November on a one year Wellcome Trust funded project to catalogue the collection, which was donated to the Richard Burton Archives in 2014.
Raissa Page has a truly fascinating back story: as the child of first generation immigrants to Canada (of a Greek Father and English mother) she was born into poverty in East Toronto. We are very lucky that there is a detailed nine-part recorded interview with Raissa from 1994 available as part of the British Library Oral History collection (accessible for UK Higher Education and Further Education institutions only). This goes into quite some detail about her truly remarkable childhood and young adulthood, which eventually culminated in her arriving in the UK by the early 1950’s. The UK remained her home for the rest of her life.
Raissa had two successful careers; firstly as a Social Worker who specialised in ‘looked after children’, working in the fostering and adoption sections of the children’s departments in both Tower Hamlets and Westminster councils in London, before latterly spending time at the National Children’s Bureau on a project called “Who Cares?” which aimed to give a voice to children in care. Then, towards the end of the 1970’s, in her mid-40’s, she made a decision to leave social work and become a documentary photographer. There is no evidence of her doing any substantial photographic work prior to this, and indeed in the oral history recordings she expresses regret that she only has a tiny number of images of her daughter as a child because she could not then afford a camera when her daughter was growing up in the 1950’s and 1960’s.
Despite attending evening college, Raissa was almost entirely self-taught, and she swiftly began gathering contracts, the most long standing of which were with the British Association of Social Workers’ Social Work Today magazine, and the Observer Magazine, both of which published numerous images of hers including several covers. Feminist magazines Spare Rib and Everywoman also ran many stories making use of her work. In 1983, Raissa became a founder member of the trailblazing all-female FORMAT Photographic Agency, conceived by Maggie Murray and Val Wilmer, and which ran for 20 years.
Her photographic collection is made up of work focussing on a huge range of areas – in feminism, in leftist politics, and in health, social work and institutional care – and includes photographic assignments to India, China, Israel, the US and Ireland. The photographs date from the late 1970’s to the early 1990’s when, sadly, developing arthritis meant Raissa could no longer easily use a camera, although she did still undertake some landscape and local photographic work in Wales, where she retired.
There are twenty boxes in the archive, all arranged in a broadly subject specific way (one of the revelations of my first few weeks is to discover just how many photographs, negatives and slides can actually fit into a relatively small cardboard box – clue: a lot). I have now started box listing these so that I can gain a fuller understanding of the breadth and scope of the collection.
Detailed cataloguing is still some way off, but the listing already under way has begun to give me a flavour of the type and breadth of material that this fascinating collection does hold – from extensive coverage of the Miners’ Strike in ’84-’85 (focussing not just on the big confrontations like Orgreave – although Raissa was also there – but also on Miners’ Wives support groups, soup kitchens, and other lesser recorded ‘behind the scenes’ activities), to the Greenham Common Peace Camps; from assignments undertaken in hospitals, residential institutions and GP’s surgeries, to detailed projects abroad.
Careful thought will need to be given to the use of these images. Copyright issues are crucial, of course, and care and sensitivity will certainly have to be shown because of potential issues relating to clearly identifiable individuals within many of the photographs who are likely still to be alive. Developing a strategy for dealing with data protection and other issues so that the material can be both accessed and used effectively will be key to the ultimate success of the project.
The overriding priority for the 12 months of this project (which completes in early Nov 2019) is to ensure that this collection is fully catalogued and thereby accessible to users. To that end, the collection will remain closed until the project is completed. However, an important part of my role is also to publicise the collection and ensure that once it is catalogued, people are aware of it, and it is fully utilised.
I would like to finish this introduction with a quote from Orson Welles: “The camera is much more than a recording apparatus, it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world.” I’m old enough for Raissa’s other world to be at least vaguely familiar in parts, but to all of us, the messages this collection can pass on from the 1970’s and 80’s are hugely important ones, and ones that we very much want as many people as possible to hear. Follow progress with the project on Twitter @RaissaPage (and whilst you are there, do also make sure you are following @SwanUniArchives too).
[‘Dancing on the silos’ at Greenham Common – copyright Raissa Page]
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