From art school to soccer pitch: Peter Robinson’s six-decade career celebrated in new exhibition in Glen Ellyn

Peter Robinson has been praised as the world’s greatest living soccer photographer.

That’s ironic; Robinson was an art school type whose passions were music and film and, as a kid, he “hated” team sports.

“As for my pictures of soccer being informed by playing the game, I would safely say I never carried any sport references from an early life into my coverage of soccer — the simple reason being there were none,” Robinson said from his home in London, where he responded to questions emailed by the Daily Herald.

Nonetheless, 53 of Robinson’s beautiful images surrounding the Beautiful Game will be part of a free exhibition, “The Saturday Man: At the Edge of the Game,” running May 30 through Aug. 9 at the Cleve Carney Museum of Art at the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn.

Curated by museum director Justin Witte and Maria VanDyken Li, co-founders and directors of The Footy Museum, the collection will offer photographs printed in Robinson’s London studio, ranging from 8x10 shots to larger prints of more than 3 feet.

The exhibition will be presented in sections representing Robinson’s work, such as “Players,” “Beyond the Pitch,” “In the Stands,” and “Rituals.”

“Over the years, I have presented many exhibitions of my work,” Robinson said. “But none have come close in producing such an eclectic mix of content as this. It truly confirms soccer as the only true international sport.”

Robinson’s six-decade career includes 20 years as FIFA’s official photographer, leading to his 2015 appointment as photography consultant for the FIFA Museum in Zurich.

Robinson covered 13 World Cups, nine Olympic Games and hundreds of soccer matches in England and Europe during the 1960s and 1970s. His reach extended worldwide, including the now-defunct North American Soccer League.

At 82, he’s accredited for the upcoming 2026 World Cup should he choose to shoot it, “but right now I am working on other exhibitions, so I haven’t been thinking about Canada, Mexico and the USA,” he said.

After studying at the Leicester College of Art and the Royal College of Art in London, Robinson wished to become a photojournalist in Paris — “the heart of storytelling photography,” he said — influenced by photographers such as American cultural critic Robert Frank, jazz photographer Reid Miles, and French New Wave film.

Instead, Robinson quickly found he could make a good living at home shooting a variety of subjects, including soccer.

He shot the stars — Pele, Franz Beckenbauer — but his calling was the human condition.

“After making sure the client was going to be happy, I found the time to be curious and explore how I could say something about the particular sports event I was at and photograph it in a totally unseen and hopefully unique way,” Robinson said.

His images have appeared in Sports Illustrated and are in museums in Berlin, Buenos Aires, and London. Two of his books, “Football Days” (2005) and “1966 Uncovered” (2006), both earned the British Sports Book Awards’ “Illustrated Sports Book of the Year.”

Robinson’s works prompted Pablo Maurer of The Athletic in 2022 to state the Londoner was “arguably the world’s greatest living soccer photographer.”

“I think people are drawn to the tradition and the deep ties to the different communities that the sport has. He’s able to capture that in his photos. I think that’s why Pablo Maurer said that about him, and I would agree,” said the Cleve Carney Museum’s Witte.

One of the images in “The Saturday Man” is a unique profile of former United States soccer star Megan Rapinoe. Shot from behind, showing only her dyed hair, the image reveals more than that, Witte believed.

According to Witte, Robinson is not only identifying the growth of women’s soccer and Rapinoe’s stardom, “but also the status of that individual player, that she had reached the iconic level — that all you needed was tousled purple hair and most people are going to know who that is.”

Robinson’s pictures go beyond the game.

“It’s kind of a wonderful anthropological viewpoint that uses soccer at the center,” Witte said.