“The quirky humanity of the beautiful game” as captured in the images of revered Leicester-born photographer Peter Robinson is on show at The Gallery on campus at De Montfort University.
The Keep off the Grass exhibition features more than 200 images – some on display for the first time – from the illustrious career of the man vaunted by The New York Times in 2022 as “arguably the world’s greatest living soccer photographer.”
Robinson captured some of the most famous images of sport, and of football in particular, in a 60-year career in which he travelled relentlessly, covering 13 football World Cups and multiple Olympic Games, and spent more than two decades as FIFA’s official photographer.
What is most distinctive about his work, and what shines through the images now on display in The Gallery at DMU, is that Robinson is always more interested in the person than he is the ball.
It is this insistence that allows him so often to capture “the quirky humanity of the beautiful game”, according to art critic Waldemar Januszczak – who also considers Robinson “the greatest living football snapper”.
This ability comes, perhaps, from the fact that Robinson, while a lover of the game, does not count himself a fan of any particular team, in football, or in any other sport, so his work is always about the human stories in and around the game, rather than about the game itself.
“I do tend to come at it sideways,” he says. “If it’s football, it’s usually a comment on football, rather than the football itself. I want every image to tell a story. A lot of sports photography is saying nothing beyond the particular moment in a game. That’s what newspapers want, but I’ve never been interested in that.”
Filmmaker and photographer Stuart Douglas has said: “What I really like is that while all the sports photographers are looking in one direction, Peter is very consciously looking in the other . . . the humanity and the personality that is visible in his imagery is so compelling.”
Some of his best images have come from looking the other way in order, as he puts it, to entertain himself while fulfilling a commercial brief.
One famous shot now on display in the DMU Keep Off the Grass exhibition is a case in point.
It shows Bulgarian player Emil Kostadinov in a second-round match against Mexico during the 1994 USA World Cup. He is sprawled on the turf crying out in pain. Right above him, the advertising hoarding shows a giant bottle or Coca-Cola, also lying on its side.
Robinson confesses that he spent most of the game with his camera trained on the adverting hoarding just waiting for someone to end up exactly where Kostadinov eventually did, under the coke bottle.
In spite of his lack of fandom, Robinson clearly has an deep affinity with and appreciation for the world of sports.
This he attributes to his mother Vera, who, under her maiden name Kingston, swam the 200m breaststroke at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, and who would tell him stories of the places she’d been and people she’d met through her involvement in what we now called elite level sport.
Born in Leicester in February 1944, three-year-old Peter Robinson moved with his mother, father and sister into a house on what was then the newly-built New Parks estate in the West of the city.
He attended City Boys Grammar School at Humberstone Gate (the same school as Gary Lineker and Alastair Campbell) and went on to study photography at Leicester School of Art – the institution which eventually became DMU.
Vera may have influenced his decision to focus on sports photography, but it was also very much a matter of financial expediency.
“The family was skint and I just felt that I had to be the breadwinner,” he said.
“Playing at being an artist or a photographer was going to be no good. I needed to get out and earn some money and the only places that were going to pay me were newspapers and magazines. I needed a regular income and the thing about football is that it’s all done to diary – you know there’s going to be a match on Wednesday night and a match on Saturday.”
From there Robinson built himself a glittering career which saw him living in Paris, New York and Berlin while travelling incessantly throughout 70s, 80s and 90s.
Commercial work followed, but for the most part Robinson turned his lens on the world of sport becoming internationally renowned for his images of football in particular.
His work now hangs in The National Portrait Gallery, London, the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin and the Museo Historico Nacional in Buenos Aires Argentina. Collections of his pictures have won ‘Illustrated Sports Book of The Year of two separate occasions. Earlier in 2025 he was also honoured in the US with a prestigious Lucie Foundation award in recognition of his achievements in sport.
“I have been blessed,” he said, “It has been great fun. In almost 60 years there is very little that I could complain about.”
Keep Off the Grass is open to the public free of charge from now until 10 January 2026.
The Leicester Gallery is open Monday to Friday 10am to 5pm and on Saturdays from midday to 5pm.
The Leicester Gallery is in the Vijay Patel Building, on the campus of De Montfort University, Mill Lane, Leicester, LE2 7PT.
For details check Leicester Gallery – World-class art in Leicester.