| Description | The collection includes photographic prints (black and white images make up the vast majority of these, but there are a small number of colour prints too), contact sheets, negatives (35mm and medium format), transparencies and slides (35mm and medium format), books and publications featuring Raissa Page content, as well as some documentation including notebooks, correspondence, and a small quantity of ephemera. |
| AdminHistory | Raissa Page (Cleone Alexandra Smilis) was Canadian, born to English and Greek parents in Toronto, Canada, and moved to the UK in the 1950s. After a career as a social worker in London, specialising in looked after children, Page became a documentary photographer in her mid-forties. She undertook commission work for many publications including Social Work Today, The Observer Magazine and Spare Rib, amongst many others, and in 1983 became a founder member of Format, an all female photographic agency, originally conceived by Maggie Murray and Val Wilmer, and run as a collective for the first ten years of its existence. Her photographic work was greatly informed by her feminism, and her political beliefs and, as well as images of demonstrations and political conflicts like Greenham Common and the Miners' Strike, it also includes portraiture, foreign travel (work from Israel, Cuba, India, China and other countries is present) along with more commercial work. Page also specialised in images recording institutional care - of the elderly, of children, and of those in poor mental health. Ill health forced her to stop working in her early sixties (she left Format in 1993) and she retired to Wales. |