The photojournalist Grace Robertson died in January this year at the age of 90. Much of her work was familiar to readers of Picture Post and Life Magazine in the 1950’s. Her work focussed on the lives of post-war women whom she usually befriended often in the pub.

She became interested in photography after leaving school at 16 and her father, the journalist Fyfe Robertson, bought her a Leica. She began taking photographs of her sister and sent photos to Picture Post under the pseudonym Dick Muir as her father also worked there and she did not want favours. It is interesting she also used a male name at that time. Although initially rejected her first photograph of her sister doing her homework was published in 1951.

Following that she began to have her work used frequently and the editor of Picture Post clearly saw that a woman photographer could bring in photographs that men might not be able to take. Grace was assigned photo essays which led to the publication of “Sheep Shearing in Wales” (1951), “Tate Gallery” (1952) and one of her most enduring series “Mother’s Day Off” (1955) which followed a group of women she had met by chance in a pub in Bermondsey on a day out in Margate. She later commented on the energy of these women and said, “They were survivors”. Two years later Grace was commissioned to repeat the feature, this time with a group of women from a pub in Clapham.

The secret to her success, as with many of her photographs, was that she took time to get to know the people she was going to portray. At over six foot she was hardly an inconspicuous woman and so she felt that if people knew her they would be familiar with her being around and therefore take less notice of her when she had her camera out. She also read that Henri Cartier-Bresson painted the silver parts of his camera black to make it less obvious and did the same in homage.

In 1955 she married a fellow photographer at Picture Post, Thurston Hopkins and they remain together until his death in 2012 at 101 years of age.

She was a left-leaning, feminist, social historian by nature and her acute sense of the changing times led her to take images thought quite controversial at times. In an interview in The Telegraph in August 2010 Roberston said that what she wanted was to help a country fractured by war to reimagine itself whole by communicating in visual terms and showing ‘this is how that group of people lives’ at a time when photojournalism was in its infancy. An example would be her series on childbirth in 1955 which showed graphic pictures of a woman giving birth. At this time fathers were still not encouraged to be present during childbirth, a situation that didn’t change for another twenty years.

After the collapse of Picture Post in 1957, Robertson worked as a freelance photojournalist. She submitting work to a range of national magazines as well as the Pictorial Press Agency. In 1992, she was commissioned by the BBC to make a documentary about nonagenarians. Robertson has written and lectured extensively on the role of women in photography and in 1999 received an OBE in recognition of her services to photography, the same year in which she was awarded the Wingate Scholarship, which she used to fund her then current project Working Mothers in Contemporary Society. Robertson is the only British photographer to have featured in an exhibition at the National Photography Gallery, USA, celebrating the first women in photojournalism. She also has work in National Galleries Scotland and the V&A in London.