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Football Days

Classic Football Photographs by Peter Robinson

This is a book that will appeal to both photographers and football fans. Luck would have it that I belong to both categories! Peter Robinson is one of the foremost photographers of the beautiful game and this book certainly demonstrates that he is a master of his craft. He has been working as a sports photographer for more than 35 years and in that time he covered eight World Cups. If you want to benefit from his vast experience you can enroll for a one week Sports Photography course that he runs in at the London College of Communication.

You could be forgiven for thinking that a 350 page large format book full of football photographs might get a bit boring. After all, football is very much a 'moving' sport (in both senses of the word!) and depicting that in two dimensions is very difficult. Fortunately this book is far from boring. The subject material is not limited to what happens on the field during the 90 minutes. Some of the best images are scenes away from the stadium. A shot of a moody looking Eric Cantona in a soulless hotel meeting room is a good example, a portrait of Bill Shankley is another. The book has got 8 chapters: Strip, Home, Touchline, Fans, Away, Pitch, Politics and Fame. This will give you a clue about what kind of photos there are in this book and that it is not only about the action on the pitch. Each chapter has a page of introductory text and there is a very interesting interview with Peter Robinson, but it is definitely a photography book. If there is any criticism to be made it would be that sometimes the captions are a bit short and leave the reader wondering about the context of the photo.

I have spent a couple of hours enjoying this book already and will go back to it often. I thoroughly recommend this book to photographers and football fans and I'll finish with a quote from the foreword by Michael Palin: "Peter Robinson understands the heart and soul of the game. His eye is generous, caustic, thoughtful and celebratory... these photographs offer as subtle and incisive an insight into the appeal of football as you could hope to find."

I am not strong on sports photography, but I did take some pictures at a match on the highest cricket pitch in England.

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