Grace Robertson

Robertson was born in Manchester, England, in 1930, to the journalist Fyfe Robertson and his wife Elizabeth (Betty; née Muir).[8][9] Both her parents were born in Scotland, and Robertson described herself as Scottish in a 2010 interview with The Scotsman.[10] After leaving school at 16 she looked after her mother, who had rheumatoid arthritis.[10][11] She became interested in photography in 1948 and, in 1949, her father gave her a Leica camera.[8][10][11]

In 1951 Robertson had a photo-essay about her younger sister doing her homework published in Picture Post,[8][11] where her father worked.[9] Another early success was on Chinese artists.[10] Some of her early submissions used the masculine pseudonym "Dick Muir", to avoid using her father's name.[8] Her first commission for Picture Post was in Snowdonia, which resulted in "Sheep Shearing in Wales" (1951).[12] In 1952, she photographed the Bluebell Girls in Italy,[12] and also published "Tate Gallery" (1952).[8]

At the date she was working, most photojournalists were men, and she was often assigned more feminine stories.[13] Working as a freelancer throughout her career, her best-known series, "Mother's Day Off", documented working-class women from Bermondsey in London, enjoying a day out in Margate, and was published in Picture Post in 1954. The middle-aged to elderly subjects are depicted dancing, drinking and on a fairground ride. She was commissioned to shoot a similar series featuring women from Clapham for Life magazine in 1956.[8][10][12] The Scotsman describes both these sets of photographs as "perfectly composed, artifice-free examples of classic reportage".[10] Her series "Childbirth", published in Picture Post in 1955, included photographs of a woman in labour and delivery, considered explicit at the time, and were among the earliest such images to appear in a magazine.[8][12]

Around this time, Life offered her a staff job in the United States, but Robertson refused.[10] After the failure of the Picture Post in 1957, she worked as a freelance photographer and photojournalist for Life and other publications, and also took advertising photographs. After having children, she trained and worked as a primary school teacher from 1966 to 1978, while continuing to take photographs.[10][12][13][14] After retiring from teaching, she started to paint during the 1980s.[13] In 1986, Channel 4 broadcast a documentary about Robertson, and her work was included in an exhibition at the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television in Bradford; several other exhibitions in the UK and the United States followed. In 1989, she published an autobiographical monograph, entitled Grace Robertson – Photojournalist of the 50s. In 1992, the BBC commissioned a programme from her about ninety year olds.[12][14] She also gave lectures on women photographers.[12][15]

Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian, characterises Robertson's work as recording ordinary women in postwar Britain, and describes her as a "proto-feminist".[8] Tirza Latimer and Harriet Riches consider her work to be "limited to a focus on women's interests."[16]

Robertson was awarded an Honorary Fellowship from the Royal Photographic Society in 1995[17] and appointed an OBE in 1999.[1][14] She received honorary degrees from the University of Brighton (1995) and Brunel University (2007).[14]

Robertson who stood 6 ft 2in in her bare feet[18][19] married in 1955 the Picture Post photographer Thurston Hopkins.[8][11] They had two children.[20] In the 1980s, on Hopkins' retirement, the couple moved to Seaford in East Sussex, where they remained until his death in 2014 at age 101.[20]

Robertson died on 11 January 2021, aged 90.[8]

Robertson's work is held in the following public collections:

• National Galleries of Scotland, Scotland: 7 prints (as of January 2021)[4]
• Science Museum Group, UK: 3 prints (as of January 2021)[5]
• Tate, London: 7 prints (as of January 2021)[6]
• The Aldrich Collection, University of Brighton School of Art, Brighton and Hove: 2 prints (as of January 2021)[21]
• Victoria and Albert Museum, London: 22 prints (as of January 2021)[7]

A portrait of Robertson by Rena Pearl is held in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London.[22]

• Rosenblum, Naomi (2014). A History of Women Photographers. New York: Abbeville.
• Robertson, Grace; Williams, Val; Graham, Beryl; Wells, Liz; Friend, Melanie (1994). Signals: Festival of Women Photographers. London: Interchange Studios.

• Selection of photographs including a self-portrait in The Guardian