A career in photography
About
"If you cannot see at a glance that the old game is up, that the camera has hopelessly beaten the pencil and paint brush as an instrument of artistic representation, then you will never make a true critic, you are only, like most critics a picture fancier"John Minihan was born in Dublin in 1946 and raised in Athy, County Kildare. At the age of 12 he was brought to live in London, and went on to become an apprentice photographer with the Daily Mail. At 21 he became the youngest staff photographer for the Evening Standard. For thirty years he remained in London, returning every year to his hometown of Athy to record the people and their daily lives.
George Bernard Shaw
In between documenting Athy on visits home, Minihan continued his career on Fleet Street, which included the iconic snap of a 19-year-old Lady Diana Spencer in the garden of the nursery she worked at, the morning sun to her back, her legs in silhouette through her skirt.
Over the years Minihan developed a close relationship with many writers and his photographs of Samuel Beckett show a particular affinity between the two men. William Burroughs once referred to Minihan as "a painless photographer".
His friendship with Samuel Beckett produced some of the most remarkable photographs ever taken of the writer.
Among his numerous photographic publications are Photographs: Samuel Beckett (1995); Shadows from the Pale, Portrait of an Irish Town (1996); and An Unweaving of Rainbows, Images of Irish Writers (1996).
He is currently a freelance photographer specialising in 'the arts'. His book of photographs of Samuel Beckett was published in 1995. His photographs of Athy have been exhibited throughout the world. He was given the freedom of Athy in 1990.
Minihan's many exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world include the Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro, 1984; Centre George Pompidou, Paris 1986; the National Portrait Gallery, London 1987/8 and the October Gallery, London 1990 as well as the Guinness Hop Store, Dublin 1991.
John Minihan has lived in Ballydehob, West Cork, Ireland for the last three years.
Background
Born in Dublin in 1946, Minihan was raised in Athy from the age of four months until he was 11. His father died before he was born; his mother abandoned him to the care of her sister before emigrating to England."My aunt, Mary Collison, reared me, and I've always regarded my aunt and uncle as my parents," says Minihan. "My mother died six years ago. She married again and had four more children. I saw her only twice, the last time when I was 11. That was never a disruptive thing in my life, because I had so much love from my aunt and uncle."At the age of 11, Minihan went to live in London, leaving school to work as an office boy at the Daily Mail, where he began his career as a photographer. "I was one of 10 runners on the editorial floor of the evening news,'' he says. "'Part of my job involved going up to the darkroom; I got to know the technicians there. After three months, an opening in the darkroom came up and my five-year apprenticeship there began my life as a photographer."
On trips back to Athy with his Rolleiflex, he began to photograph subjects there, starting with the wedding of a friend. `'I began photographing Athy at the age of 16," he says. "By the mid-1960s I was becoming aware of the importance of the work I was doing documenting life there."
A style began to emerge, influenced at first by the work of Edward S Curtis, who documented the lives of native Americans, and the work of the Hungarian Andre Kertesz, who pioneered the photography of the candid moment. The crucial event that pulled Minihan's Athy work together came in February 1977, when a local woman, Katie Tyrrell, died.
Minihan asked a publican friend, Bertie Doyle, to ask her family for permission to photograph the wake. The family agreed, and for two days and three nights Minihan photographed the events from Tyrrell's deathbed to her grave.
In between documenting Athy on visits home, Minihan continued his career on Fleet Street, which included the iconic snap of a 19-year-old Lady Diana Spencer in the garden of the nursery she worked at, the morning sun to her back, her legs in silhouette through her skirt.
Publications
Samuel Beckett - Photographs by John MinihanPublished 1995 by Secker & Warburg
Introduction by Aidan Higgins
Paperback: ISBN 0436202522
The Irish photographer John Minihan first met Samuel Beckett in May 1980, and was to photograph him many times thereafter in both Paris and London, a privilege afforded to very few. Impossible to interview and famously camera-shy, Beckett was nevertheless a remarkable photographic subject, with his wise, eagle-like face which reflected his greatness and profundity as a writer. This is a collection of Beckett portraits.
Shadows from the Pale - Portrait of an Irish Town
Published 1996 by Martin Secker & Warburg Limited
Introduction by Eugene McCabe
Hardback: ISBN 0436203472
Paperback: ISBN 0436204037
For the past thirty-five years, John Minihan has been photographing his home town of Athy, County Kildare and its people. It is an ordinary Irish county town which is gradually feeling the incursions of industry, comparative wealth and modernity.
Minihan was raised in Athy and has known many of the people in the photographs for over thirty years. We see Martin Rigney, the undertaker, with his son crying as his father makes another coffin; Mary Byrne holding up a picture of herself as a young girl; a man deep in thought as he sips his Guinness.
At the centre of the book is the wake of Katy Tyrrell, which Minihan photographed for two nights and three days. She is dressed in the Legion of Mary burial shroud. The mirror is covered with a white sheet. Fires are put out. Clocks are stopped. The wake room is prepared for family and friends to pay their last respects to the deceased. The vigil will go on through the night with only a candle flickering. These photographs have been exhibited throughout the world and the critic Harold Hobson was moved to call them 'sad, poignant and sublime'.
An Unweaving of Rainbows - Images of Irish Writers
Published 1998 by Souvenir Press Ltd.
Foreword by Derek Mahon
Hardback: ISBN 0285634585
This beautiful book has been lovingly put together over the past thirty years by one of Ireland's most celebrated photographers. As might be expected of the man whose photographs of Samuel Beckett brought him wide acclaim, these are not formal portraits, but studies in moments and moods, penetrating behind the public faces to the essential nature of the man or woman within.
Here, caught laughing and talking, sitting in quiet reverie, working at home or walking along the street, are the giants of Ireland's literary scene - Samuel Beckett, Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, William Trevor, Dervla Murphy, Edna O'Brien, Benedict Kiely, Brian Moore, Maeve Binchy, Bernard MacLaverty, Padraic Fiacc, Patrick McCabe, Neil Jordan ... the list goes on. With them are reminders of the great writers of the past: the gravestones and former homes, now places of pilgrimage, of such writers as Brendan Behan, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Oscar Wilde and J. M. Synge.
Including photographs of many of the Dublin bars and buildings that are literary landmarks, this book encapsulates the spirit of Irish creativity and throws fresh light on the writer's mind. John Minihan, an artist in his own medium, has paid lasting tribute to the masters and mistresses of the written word, at a time when we are witnessing a new flowering of inspired Irish talent whose influence spans the world.
John Minihan's Cork
Published 2004 by Robert Hale
Hardback: ISBN 0709077149
He was born in Dublin but spent his childhood in Athy, Co. Kildare. At the age of twelve he was bought to live in London, and he went on to become an apprentice photographer with the Daily Mail and a photojournalist with the Evening Standard. For 30 years he remained in London, returning every year to his hometown of Athy to record the people and their daily lives. This project was to become his book Shadows from the Pale, published in 1996. Throughout this time he was also photographing Irish writers, notably Samuel Beckett who formed the subject of a highly praised book published in 1995.
