Don’t forget to press play above to listen to the full podcast interview with John Minihan.
The moment you ask John Minihan if you can take a quick snap of him on an iPhone is an awkward one.
He’s told me in a previous interview that digital photography is “like cremation.” Just the dust of so many pixels, blown away by the merest whiff of time.
He obliges good-humouredly, though. He moves away from the window until his back is to the room: “Would you like me to sit here? I find the light is best coming at the person.”
But it’s Saturday in the bustle of the West Cork Hotel in Skibbereen, and there are too many diners behind him now, and of course the glossy tyranny of the iPhone does not cede control of something like depth of field, so I politely ask him to return to his chair by the window.
“Of course,” he says, standing. There’s a slight pause, a miniscule raise of an eyebrow, and then, an ever-so-slightly pointed “you’re the photographer.”
“Love, life and death. That’s all you can photograph. Not all of us on this journey get all of those things. Some of us are deprived of love, or even of life. But we’re all guaranteed the fucking death.”
Minihan is probably most famous for his iconic portrait of Samuel Beckett, one amongst many photographs he has taken not only of Beckett, but of a dazzling array of literary figures over the course of his lifelong career as a press photographer.
Over 60 years ago, Minihan became an apprentice photographer on the Daily Mail on Fleet Street, and just years later became the youngest press photographer working for the London Evening Standard, capturing images of London life in the swinging sixties and beyond.
Besides this work, Minihan also returned home to document his home town of Athy, Co Kildare on a regular basis for 34 years.
Now 76, Minihan reflects on all these experiences and so many more, including being the first photographer on the scene when a young Diana Spencer’s engagement to the Prince of Wales was announced, in the podcast above.
Having made his mark primarily through photographing titans of the literary and art worlds, Minihan’s latest solo exhibition is devoted to, and has as subject matter, one man who, Minihan believes, is an oft-overlooked Irish poet.
Minihan first met Belfast-born Fiacc, born Patrick Joseph O'Connor, in the summer of 1984 and photographed him over the course of many encounters based as much on friendship as on a photographer-subject relationship. Fiacc died in his nineties in 2019.
You can read Minihan’s recounting of his relationship with Fiacc here.
Poet of the Troubles: a photographic tribute to the late Irish poet Pádraic Fiacc is on in UCC Library, with the launch at 5pm on Tuesday, April 26.
The exhibition also runs concurrently from Thursday, April 28 until Tuesday, May 31 at the Irish Cultural Centre in Hammersmith, London W6 9DT.
"Black and white are my primary colours."