Im looking for confrontation: Inside the work of Peter Robinson, one of soccers greatest

May 09, 2024

Peter Robinson is arguably the world’s greatest living soccer photographer, and a glance at his resume reveals why. He has shot 13 men’s World Cups, nine Olympic Games and thousands of other matches. His work has appeared in dozens of books and countless magazines. His lens has been trained on nearly every one of the world’s great players over the past six decades: Best, Pele, Maradona, Messi. Robinson’s own book of football photographs, Football Days, is widely considered to be the definitive work of the genre.

His photos, though, often feel only tangentially related to football. Robinson is perfectly capable of nailing an action shot, the sorts of frozen moments we’ve become accustomed to seeing in sports photography — a player angling towards goal, ready to strike, or leaping over a defender in full stride. But he’s made his name on the game’s more complex moments, and a great many of them have little to do with the action at all.

If you ask Robinson, now 78, to reflect on a few of his favorite photographs, he’ll sometimes arrive at one in particular. It’s a shot taken in 2004 from inside the groundskeeper’s hut at Roots Hall, the home of English club Southend United. Inside the hut, an old tube television shows the action of Southend’s encounter with Luton Town, a game which is also unfolding just beyond the open door on the opposite side of the frame. The walls of the hut are plastered with pin-up calendars, the entire place cluttered with the groundskeeper’s tools and personal effects.

(Peter Robinson)

Robinson will tell you how he took the photograph: the lens he was using, at the time, was not wide enough to allow him to get the groundskeeper, the television and the open door in the same shot, so he chose to capture what he considered to be the most important elements of the scene. What he can’t tell you, though, is why he likes the photo so much, or what makes the thing so evocative. And neither can I. And that’s why I love the photo so much, and why it’s been on the wall of my office for years.

“Just because you shoot it,” says Robinson, ”it doesn’t necessarily mean you understand what you’re shooting. I’m not looking for balance. I’m looking for out of balance, I think. I’m looking for confrontation, something that looks peaceful but it isn’t. You see the carpet, and there’s a big lump, and you’re not sure what it is underneath. It could be a mouse, could be a bomb. It’s a little like that.”

Robinson’s upbringing in the 40s and 50s was quaint and, as he tells it, largely devoid of the creative arts. His father was a policeman; his mother, at that point a housewife, had actually swam for Great Britain at the 1936 Olympic Games, something that Robinson says may have given him an early appreciation for the intersection of politics, sport and spectacle. Robinson worked for his school newspaper, but even then he hadn’t taken an interest in photography.

After graduating, Robinson found himself working with a few friends as a concert promoter, helping bring American blues acts like John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters to the UK. At one event, he struck up a conversation with a few students from Leicester Art School, all of whom were enrolled in the photography program. Within weeks, Robinson enrolled at the school. It was clear almost immediately, Robinson says, that he’d struck on what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.

“Prior to that, I don’t recall ever having made a connection with photography,” says Robinson. “When I went to art school, it was quite a revelation. You shot pictures and then you had to show them to a class, and get critiqued, and the feedback was pretty good. I knew nothing about photography, technically. I was completely useless. I suppose I didn’t know what the rules were, and if there were any rules, I was breaking them. I just shot in this bizarre sort of way.”

A year into art school, Robinson felt the urge to strike out and work as a photographer for a living. He shopped his slender portfolio of work from paper to paper, finding few takers. There was freelance work to be found, but Robinson wanted a staff job, steady cash he could use to help his family get by. Eventually, he realized he probably needed to start a bit lower on the totem pole and took a job delivering a local football rag from the printer to a handful of newsstands.

His employer, though, knew he had dabbled in photography and one day, they asked him to shoot some photographs at his next destination, a Torquay United match. The rest, as they say, is history.

Robinson was never a soccer fan. While other teens at his high school were kicking a ball about, Robinson and a few of his other classmates were “sneaking around to the back of the changing pavilion and smoking cigarettes,” he says. He actually ended up taking some of his earliest sports photographs as a study in celebrity more than anything else.

By 1965, Manchester United forward George Best had cemented his status as the world’s first celebrity footballer. With a mop of dark hair and boyish good looks, Best had been dubbed “the fifth Beatle” by the UK press and was rapidly becoming tabloid fodder for his exploits off the field. Robinson, a no-name art student, took a chance and wrote Manchester United a letter, asking the club if they’d allow him to photograph Best in person. Shockingly, the club agreed.

“Can you even imagine?,” asks Robinson. “I hadn’t got any money, so I actually (hitchhiked) there. I had all of two rolls of film, one of which I wanted to use for the game and the other to photograph him getting into his car or signing autographs later.”

Using an off-brand Russian camera and a lens he borrowed from a local shop, Robinson burned through both rolls of film during the game. He still has several of the shots he produced that day, photographs of a young George Best standing at midfield, his jersey draped loosely over his body, his arms at his sides. He is a boy amongst men, still unspoiled by his budding fame, still the purest footballer many had ever seen.

“I could sense something in him,” says Robinson. “He was vulnerable, clearly. He felt different. I wish I could explain it to you — I thought I was looking at somebody who was on a different planet, really.”

(Peter Robinson)

Best would go on to be a favorite subject for Robinson. For two decades, his work is peppered with shots of Best. Best emerging from a Lotus Europa in the parking lot at Old Trafford. Best, covered in mud, carving a path through a pair of defenders while playing for Northern Ireland. Best, in the 1970’s, with a suntan and heavy beard during his American sojourn with the Los Angeles Aztecs. Years later, Robinson chatted with him at the tail end of his life, when he was dying of liver failure.

“He was just fodder for the media, and he went along with it,” says Robinson. “Near the end I remember meeting him and God almighty, he was completely destroyed, physically. I certainly did not photograph him then. It was just not something I wanted to do.”

Robinson’s early work was done on a Rolleiflex, the sort of camera you may have come across at your grandparents house. With two lenses — one a viewfinder and the other used for the image itself — the camera is often slow, cumbersome and not well-suited for sports photography. It was, though, for years the industry standard.

In the right hands, these old medium format cameras, using a negative several times larger than 35mm film, could produce spectacular images. Bereft of a motor drive, autofocus or nearly any other modern amenity, they also forced the photographer to think a bit faster and be much, much more selective.

“Guys of my (era), generally speaking, do not shoot a lot,” says Robinson. “You had to be very very sure when to take the picture. There was no second chance. If it was an action picture of some sort, or something critical, you only had one stab at it. You took one picture, you wound on, and you took another. What this produced was this decisive moment mentality, really, as (Henri Cartier-Bresson) said.”

It’s a far cry from the current state of affairs. More modern sports photography started in earnest in the 1970s, with the advent of a reliable, modern motor drive, allowing photographers to tear through an entire roll of 35mm film — typically 36 exposures — in less than a minute. Gradually, the idea that you’d have to conserve film or pick your spot went by the wayside. The mentality has disappeared almost entirely with the popularization of digital photography, which allows a soccer photographer to capture thousands of images, if need be, over the course of a 90-minute match. Robinson, though, never really let go of the training his brain received peering through a Rolleiflex.

“Photographers my age are not usually over-shooters,” he says. “They are under-shooters. They might shoot three frames where the current crop of 26-year-olds might shoot 500. Certainly, they shoot the shit out of everything.”

That selective nature is almost always evident in Robinson’s work. So frequently his photographs, even action photographs, have their intruders — subjects that pull your eyes away from the primary action in the shot. In one, an Italian player strikes a corner kick, flanked perfectly on both sides by a pair of Massachusets State Troopers at the 1994 World Cup.

(Peter Robinson)

Others have their own interlopers, so perfectly timed; mascots, stadium employees, even inanimate objects.

(Peter Robinson)

His work, at times, has the feel of a photograph from an entirely different era. Looking at his photos some years back, I was reminded of famed American photographer Walker Evans, who worked with the Farm Services Administration in the 1930s to document life during the Great Depression. Indeed, Robinson cites Evans as a primary influence along with a crop of others: the iconic documentary photographer Robert Frank and also William Klein, whose work, on the surface, feels a bit further removed from Robinson’s.

Robinson’s photos of fans have their own unique pull. A photo of Bobby Charlton approaching to take a corner kick is pleasant enough in its own right but the sea of faces behind him, with looks of admiration, adoration and eagerness, give the image the feel of a renaissance painting.

(Peter Robinson)

Others are simpler, images of supporters sitting on park benches or watching a match on television. And there are certainly images that evoke football’s darker side — ultras bathed in the red glow of their flares, riot police clashing with supporters. Robinson’s darkest image, a pile of bodies in the stands after 39 people were killed at the Heysel Stadium disaster in 1985, landed on the cover of Newsweek.

There’s another common thread in Robinson’s work — you’ll find a great many photographs he’s taken of subjects sitting alone, often aligned towards the edge of the frame. Eric Cantona seated alone at a table, a small figure in a large conference room. It’s often a bit sad, really, something Robinson owns.

“The difference between me and the majority of sports photographers, generally, is that they probably were sporty themselves,” he says. “They probably started photography very early, their parents gave them a camera, they were in love with the idea of winners and the celebratory aspect of it, and the moment when the guy crosses the line or scores a goal — the big moment. And I didn’t give a shit. I was always more interested in losers than winners. I was always more interested in what was going on — was there some subtext to a picture? It was never an obvious moment, really.”

(Peter Robinson)

Robinson made his name photographing football in Europe, particularly in the United Kingdom, but his work documenting the history of the game in the United States is also invaluable. The images of the North American Soccer League in its heyday — ones we so often see of Johan Cruyff, Franz Beckenbauer, all of the league’s greats, were taken by Robinson.

(Peter Robinson)

One of his most iconic images (shown at the top of this piece) was taken on Randall’s Island, the short-lived home of the New York Cosmos and the site of one of this country’s watershed soccer moments — Pelé’s 1975 NASL debut. By showing Pelé with his back to the camera, Robinson manages to perfectly capture what that moment truly meant, shirking the opportunity to show the face of the world’s most famous footballer and choosing his backside instead.

“I thought ‘everybody knows what he looks like,’ If I’d have gotten his face as he was (entering the stadium), I don’t think I’d have been as wild about the picture,” Robinson remembers. “I needed to see the people he was looking at.”

His images of the 1994 World Cup also shine. Colorful landscapes of stadiums, fans sporting Oakleys and Ocean Pacific tees, players sporting mullets and perms. And there’s plenty to digest from off-the-field, as well — among my favorite images of Robinson’s is a simple one, a photo of the marquee outside of an Orlando-area strip club. Even the world of exotic dance couldn’t help but get caught up in World Cup fever, as the sign advertises free tickets to World Cup matches.

(Peter Robinson)

Much has changed since the heyday of Robinson’s career. Access, for one, is an entirely different animal. The photograph taken from the groundskeeper’s hut, for example, would likely never happen. Candid shots of players in vulnerable moments or coaches in their offices feel impossible to get. Photographers are corralled in the corners of stadiums, with only a very select few allowed on the pitch before or after the match.

“If Liverpool, say, gave you access, they’d say ‘we’ll give you access, but we want to see what you shoot’,” says Robinson. “And they would then decide what you could actually use … But I think it’s still possible (to do independent work.) I wish I was 48 instead of 78. Because I think the things that you can see that are wrong with soccer now, I think it’s very interesting and it needs to be recorded. But it needs to be recorded by people who might be a wee bit cynical, or are prepared to dig. And I am prepared to dig. But I don’t see many people doing it, which is a bit sad, really.”

Robinson himself hung up his gear and retired after the 2019 Women’s World Cup.

“I decided to go to France, but not photograph the game,” Robinson says. “I wanted to photograph the supporters, talk to those women. Outside the ground I set up a little area where I could shoot portraits and interview supporters. It was fabulous. For me, it was probably one of the best things I”ve ever done.”

(Peter Robinson)

Not long after, Robinson began to feel ill. He felt a lump in his neck, which turned out to be cancerous. He spent a full year undergoing chemotherapy, and things are looking up at this point. So now, Robinson’s head is full of ideas. He’d like to return to the U.S. soon, maybe to take a train or a bus up the “blues route” from New Orleans to Chicago, retracing the steps of the musicians he fell in love with as a teenager. And this second chance at life of sorts has him thinking of picking up his camera again, as well.

“Something about Qatar has sort of got into my head,” Robinson says. “Not the matches. I don’t want to go to these (generic) stadiums that look like they could be any place on earth. I just want to see what I can get out of this interaction between this country and the spectators and players. I’d like to start doing portraits again.”

“Assuming I’m still vertical,” Robinson says with a chuckle “I will draw the line at 2026, in Mexico, Canada and the USA.”

You can view many more of Robinson’s photos on his website.

(All photos courtesy Peter Robinson)

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