Amazing Grace

Now in her eighties, Grace Robertson is still taking interesting, beautiful photos.  Grace's father was the editor of 'Picture Post' and used to tell her that  photographers were mainly mature men. Still,  when she told him that she wanted to be a photo-journalist he got her a second hand Leica. However she didn't want to use his position to make her way, so originally called herself Dick Muir, after a boy she had fancied but who wasn't interested in her! Her mother would make sure that she was wearing a hat and gloves when she left the house, not that these necessarily stayed on for long. She had friends who fell out with her because of her unconventional job (parents didn't approve!).

She would spend time with the people she wanted to photograph, until they got used to her - at 6ft 2in she was fairly noticeable. She felt she was an observer of people, especially women, trying to work out 'what made women tick.' Photo-journalism was a new form of media, and Grace says that after the war 'We as a nation were talking to each other through pictures in magazines', with the country trying to re-imagine itself whole.

She was disturbed by women's ignorance of sexual matters, so did a series of photographs of births in 1955 which were some of the first to be published.

She now lives on the south coast with her husband, the photographer Thurston Hopkins.