Real Beckett not Black and White
Sunday Business Post - Sunday, April 16, 2006 - By Emmanuel Kehoe

No one can blame John Minihan if someone calls his photograph of Samuel Beckett at a Paris cafe table ‘‘the image of the century’’. Whatever you think of his spare majesty as a writer, surely Beckett himself would have demurred. A man who had lived through the German occupation of France might find other images more properly and emphatically emblematic of the century in which he lived . . . like that utterly desolate picture of a column of Jews, headed by a young woman and a child, being herded out of the Warsaw ghetto. The list of contenders seems almost endless, enough to keep a couple of characters wrangling for hours on a barren stage. Images of fire, famine, plague, earthquake, war, occasionally of lovers kissing in a public street - which might take the accolade?

Which strikes the chord that moves us most?

Photography is in its third century now, capturing the great and the wretched of the earth. From being both a hobby strictly for the rich and a new industry in the 19th century, it became utterly demotic when companies such as Kodak put a cheap camera and roll of film in everyone’s hand, allowing for the first time in human history the activities and appearance of ordinary people to survive beyond their deaths.

But, even in its infancy, the new process could capture enduring emblematic images. Think of Robert Howlett’s 1857 photograph of Isambard Kingdom Brunel in stovepipe hat and chewing a cigar as he stands by the launching chains of his revolutionary ship, the Great Eastern. The age of iron and freebooting capital is captured on a fragile glass negative, the printing process involving the delicate white of eggs.

John Minihan’s favourite camera just now is a Rolleiflex, a twin-lens reflex film camera of a type that has been made since the 1920s. His famous 1985 picture of Beckett in Paris, just one of six taken at the time of that meeting, was made with a Hasselblad.

There was no suggestion in the Arts Lives programme, The Man Who Shot Beckett (RTE1), that Minihan would move to digital, now that even phones take pictures.

Black and white work can etch faces and monumentalise everyday scenes more strongly than colour can.

The process still requires chemicals, the darkroom, the printer’s art. The instant gratification and results granted by digital photography don’t figure here; selection is made first instinctively and then refined calculatedly, in a red-lit alchemical world of sloshing liquids and acrid smells.

Minihan, Dublin-born, Athy and London raised, had been working for years as a by-line happy, Fleet Street photographer when I first met him.

He had been recording the city’s roiling life in his day-to-day work, including popular icons of the 1960s, feeding an insatiable appetite for newspaper images at a time when individual photographers were rising above the jostling generality of snappers and becoming stars themselves.

The Beatles, The Who, The Kinks and Chuck Berry passed before his lens. Francis Bacon too.

Later, one of his most famous - or notorious -pictures was of the future Princess Diana in the kindergarten where she worked. Back-lit, her legs are visible through her summer dress.

But Minihan had another mission, one that over time authenticated his credentials. Every year he returned to Athy to photograph its people. We met after he had produced his 1977 photographic essay on the wake of a local woman Katy Tyrrell, ‘‘A strong series of photographs on the dying art of dying,” Minihan said.

Though striking, and finely executed, I found them somewhat morbid at the time. Others didn’t. The pictures led Beckett, who was shown them in London in 1980, to allow Minihan to photograph him, first in the Hyde Park Hotel, then in the Riverside Studios. He photographed Beckett at the Riverside four years later and finally, a year after that in Paris.

Could a photographer fail to make something of the Beckett head? If anything the Minihan pictures add to the popular image of Beckett as some strange, solitary literary exotic. The aquiline features and angular body suggest a fearful energy held in check.

The ‘‘image of the century’’ may show two coffee cups on the table, but Beckett is not engaging any more, his eyes have drifted away.

However, in other pictures from the Paris series, the duffel-coated Beckett stares directly at the camera. The world prefers him otherwise: introspective, self-contained, enigmatic, unapproachable.

Yet the evidence is that Beckett was, if not gregarious, then certainly convivial and chatty.

The late Jack McGowran, for example, was in awe of him when they met. But Beckett was shy and the pair said nothing for 20 minutes. Then McGowran mentioned rugby and the ice broke. McGowran became one of Beckett’s greatest interpreters and he recalled that the writer liked a night out, and that they would walk the Paris streets together in the early hours.

In the Arts Lives film, actor Stephen Rea, who worked with Beckett, said he ‘‘was considered to be a remote and prickly enough character, but I didn’t find that. He was a most generous, warm, south Dublin, lovely guy. . . he was very open to friendship, if you had the nerve.”

At an exhibition in Dublin, Rea bought one of Minihan’s pictures of The Who. ‘‘I was so taken by the beauty of those young men that were The Who in 1964. He has caught a moment not just of 60s culture, but a moment of crazy young men exploding.

“There’s something tender about that picture of The Who a mere journalistic photographer wouldn’t get.”

Newspaper photographers, as a breed, have high notions of themselves and are fiercely competitive.

The best of them, producing remarkable images often under pressure, might resent his phrase ‘‘mere journalistic photographer’’.

Produced and directed by David Bickley, the Man Who Shot Beckett was an intense and intelligent portrait even if it told us nothing whatever of Minihan’s personal life today.

‘‘I’m not an artist, I’m a photographer,” Minihan said. But he has made much of his four photographic encounters with Samuel Beckett.

Beckett, whose early critical work dealt with Joyce, with whose family he became, for a while, closely associated in Paris, would probably be entertained at an unconscious Minihan joke, an echo of the ambiguity that pervades Beckett’s work. For almost a decade, a cropped version of Minihan’s photograph, Gentlemen in Doyle’s Bar, has illustrated the Penguin Modern Classics edition of James Joyce’s Dubliners. Doyle’s is in Athy.

David Jason has played a wide boy in his time, and an irascible copper, but a bewhiskered Jason found himself as a submariner in the spooky but confusing Ghostboat (UTV).

The boat (submarines, no matter how big, are always boats - remember Das Boot?) is the Scorpion, a British WWII submarine that vanishes on patrol, but mysteriously reappears, sailing along, intact but crewless in 1981. Jason’s character was picked out of the water at the time of the sub’s disappearance and though he has no memory of what happened, he joins the boat on a mission to retrace its original voyage, into waters now patrolled by the Soviet navy.

It was, of course, hokum, but captured the claustrophobia and eeriness of the haunted submarine as strange forces began to affect the crew.

I have been inside a couple of submarines, one a preserved wartime British sub at Gosport, the other a US boat visiting Dublin. The experience is the nearest thing to how I imagine caving to be: dark, damp, cramped and more than slightly scary.

The serving US sub, I recall, smelled incontinently of wet rubber and, overwhelmingly, of Old Spice, which was then clearly the perfume of choice among strapping submariners.

As it was a ‘‘dry’’ boat, like all US navy craft, maybe they drank the stuff.

Confusing much of the time, Ghostboat was at least an unusual television drama, but as usual for a two-parter, way too long.

Sardine-sized John Mills was ideal for submarine duties so he slotted in nicely to a couple of British stiff-upper-lip undersea flicks, We Dive at Dawn and Morning Departure.

In Spivs (BBC2), Mills turned up in a clip from Waterloo Road, a gritty 1945 Sidney Gillatt film in which serviceman Mills goes AWOL to tackle a spiv who has seduced his wife. Stewart Granger played the high-living thug, in an example of cinema’s love-hate relationship with the spiv.

Entrepreneur or criminal, or both, the spiv essentially is associated with wartime rationing and the black market.

Supplying a need for everyday luxuries - and even essentials - in a time of crisis, spivs affected flash clothes and lived fast.

The film was particularly good on the cinema’s portrayal of spivs, from the wicked little spivlet Pinky Brown in Brighton Rock and Granger in Waterloo Road to loveable rogues such as George Cole’s Flash Harry in the St Trinians films and James Beck’s Joe Walker in Dad’s Army.

Incidentally, Beck, a cockney whose background might have been that of any spiv (his mother made flowers and his father was frequently unemployed) died during the run of Dad’s Army in 1973.

George Cole, however, went on to play a latter-day spiv, Arthur Daly, in Minder. And you might say David Jason’s Del Boy was a bit of a spiv himself, before he got into submarines.

Beckett photograph collection launched
The Irish Times - 14 April 2006

Samuel Beckett's official photographer, John Minihan, was due to launch a collection of iconic Beckett photographs at the Irish Arts Center in New York last night, writes Sean O'Driscoll Minihan, from Athy, Co Kildare, shot some of the most famous photographs of Beckett in Paris and London in the 1980s. Mr Minihan flew into New York for the exhibition and said that he was delighted to honor one of the great writers of the 20th century. Actors Liam Neeson and Gabriel Byrne are to view the exhibition later in the week.

Beckett's darkly comic effect
The Irish Times - 13 April 2006

THOUGH FAMOUSLY PUBLICITY-SHY and rarely photographed, Beckett became an iconic figure, a living embodiment of a Left Bank intellectual, craggy and dark and severe and enduringly stylish. One of the people responsible for his iconic status is undoubtedly the Irish photographer John Minihan, who was greatly taken with the writer. Centenary Shadows at the National Photographic Archive marshalls his portrait images and shots of several productions of Beckett's plays. The writer was, it has to be said, a compelling subject, a formidable and intense presence. There is one shot of Beckett that recalls but does not match the celebrated photograph of James Dean in Paris, on the boulevard of broken dreams. What comes across consistently, though, is Minihan's warmth toward his subject, and his subject's reciprocal warmth and co-operation. One of the best known images, from 1984, is particularly apt: we see Beckett walking away, satchel over his shoulder. Centenary Shadows, John Minihan, National Photographic Archive, Temple Bar until May 27 (01-6030371)

Beckett's eyes have it
The Irish Times - 8 April 2006

The eyes of Samuel Beckett followed viewers around the room of Dublin's National Photographic Archive.

The photographs of Beckett taken by John Minihan went on view last Wednesday. At the show's opening, Aongus Ó hAonghusa, director of the National Library, described the pictures as "a rarity, given their subject's reluctance to pose for photographs". "I had the tenacity to track him down," explained Minihan on the relationship of trust he established with Beckett. In later years, he added "he allowed me to photograph him in 1985 for his 80th birthday the following year". In the most famous photograph from Minihan's collection, entitled Samuel Beckett: Centenary Shadows, which was also launched in book form, the writer is in a coffee shop in Paris, looking into the distance. "It's my favourite because of the eyes," said the French ambassador, Frédéric Grasset, who opened the show and launched the book. "In this one he doesn't look at you. In the others he looks at you, he watches you, [ but in this] it really captures Beckett as a man, as a writer, as a character, everything. And also Paris, you smell the streets, you smell the Frenchness, all the atmosphere, through it."

"That's the killer shot," said photographer Johnnie Doyle, looking admiringly at this iconic image later. "The nose, the eyes, the face are perfectly focused and the rest falls away beautifully. That's why it's so intense."

Two of John Minihan's Artist Proof Prints in Sotheby's Sale
Press Release - 7 April 2006

John Minihan’s management team is pleased to announce that two of John’s photographic prints of Samuel Beckett are in the Sotheby’s Irish Art sale in London on 11 May 2006.  Lot 119 is of Samuel Beckett in Le Petit Café, Boulevard St Jacque, Paris, 1985.  The silver gelatine print measures 51x40.5cm and is an Artists Proof numbered 2 of and edition of 4 on the reverse.

Lot 120 is of Samuel Beckett on Boulevard St Jacque, Paris, 1985.  The silver gelatine print measures 51x40.5cm and is an Artists Proof numbered 2 of and edition of 4 on the reverse. 

The Day I Captured the Image of the 20th Century
Daily Mail - 4th April, 2006

IT WAS an unlikely meeting of creative instincts on a grey morning in a London hotel in 1980 photographer John Minihan, the man responsible for iconic images of everyone from the Rolling Stones to Princess Diana, and Samuel Beckett, the reclusive Irish artist in exile with little love for the cult of celebrity and those who pursued it.

And yet, between these two very different Irishmen who had found their true calling well beyond the constricting borders of their birth, a lasting friendship was born. 'Finally getting to meet Sam Beckett in that hotel room was the culmination of a ten year journey for me,' recalled Minihan yesterday at the farmhouse in Ballydehob, West Cork, to which he has retired. Working at the Daily Mail and London Evening Standard for much of his life in England, Kildare-born Minihan, now 62, remembered the night of Beckett's Nobel Prize for literature in 1969 as the moment the journey began.

'We were running a story but discovered there were only two very vague images of Beckett taken many years before. It was like he didn't exist - that was the moment I decided I wanted to meet this man and take his photograph.'

A decade of blind alleys and polite refusals ensued as Minihan unsuccessfully attempted to make contact through Beckett's Parisian publishers.

While he was enjoying an after-work drink at his local in Notting Hill Gate in 1980, a chance comment opened a fresh avenue of possibility.

'A friend of mine who was a hotel porter told me Sam was staying in Hyde Park hotel during his rehearsals of Endgame - it was all I needed to hear.'

Arriving at the hotel's reception next morning, Minihan penned a note to his quarry: 'I said I wanted to meet him in my capacity as an Irishman who had spent the last 20 years photographing my home town of Athy and in particular a sequence of pictures of a wake and funeral he might be interested to see.'

Phoning the hotel next morning, Beckett's softly-spoken Dublin accent invited Minihan to call next day at nine.

'I arrived expecting to see him in the lobby, only to be shown up to his room, number 604. I knocked, and there he was - this reclusive Irishman whom nobody had photographed in so long.'

Rather than an austere and aloof individual, John Minihan encountered the opposite: 'Inaccessible, cranky irascible - all those preconceptions went out the window - all myth.

'Sam was hospitality itself, charming, inquiring about where I lived, where I walked, drank, and Ireland - always talk of Ireland and rugby.'

Poring over the photographs, Minihan's homage to his home town of Athy, Beckett silently regarded the faces from a country he had left decades before.
'Those photographs earned me trust,' says Minihan.

'Twenty-six years after first meeting Sam, I now know why he allowed me into his world. He had an aversion to journalists. He didn't trust them. A photograph, on the other hand, was a case of "what you see is what you get". And so, he trusted me.'

Having won the Evening Standard Amateur Photographer contest at 15, John Minihan found himself learning his craft as an apprentice darkroom printer at the Daily Mail.

At 21, he became the youngest ever staff photographer on the Evening Standard. After a childhood in the 1950s' isolation of his native Athy, the plunge into London's rich tapestry of possibilities had a profound effect.

'My first job was a runner - taking copy from people like Bernard Levin. It was a blur of frenetic activity, a place I knew was exactly where I wanted to be on the princely wage of one pound fifty shillings a week.'

After a second meeting in London in 1985, Minihan pushed Beckett for a series of shots in Paris the following year to commemorate his 80th birthday. 'I'm sure I was becoming a bit of a pain as far as Sam was concerned. I did push my luck but he agreed.'

Beckett was now a regular in the PLM - a large hotel close to his apartment on the Boulevard St Jacques.

'I arrived at his apartment bearing Bushmills. And it was like the four years in between were four days, he was off again talking about Ireland, sport, the scene in Dublin, my work in Athy. He asked about the people he'd seen in the photographs, were they still alive or dead.'

MINIHAN had ear marked a perfect nearby cafe for their meet - a place with perfect light and atmosphere. Instead, Beckett walked directly to the PLM and his usual table in the quiet recesses of the restaurant.

They rarely spoke about Beckett's work: 'Sam was tired of deep thinkers constantly pestering him about the "real" meaning of this or that - he'd had a lifetime of it and I often thought he simply didn't have the answers to many of the questions.

'He was utterly content to pass time talking about photography and the world I inhabited. I never had a sense of the man needing to have his back slapped for the millionth time.' After an afternoon of conversation, Minihan gently pushed for a photo. 'He told me to meet here again tomorrow at three in the afternoon, I was over the moon. I was going to capture Beckett in Paris - his adopted home.'

Arriving early, Minihan chose the best table for light and substance. 'Light is oxygen, without it you have nothing.'
 
Beckett walked in at precisely three and again proceeded to talk, smoke cheroots and drink whiskey as the minutes waned toward dusk.

'He was playing with me,' smiles Minihan. 'He knew well the light was fading even though I tried hard not to show my anxiousness. It wasn't until ten to five that he said to me: "Would you like to take a photograph here?" Another five minutes and the opportunity would have been lost.'

As Minihan focused his Hassleblad, Beckett transformed into the perfect subject. 'Just like in London, he took charge of how he wanted to be captured - he stubbed out the cheroot, put his hand on his knee and gazed forth as if I wasn't there. It was remarkable.'

In a picture that was subsequently termed 'the image of the 20th century', Minihan had succeeded in capturing what publisher John Calder described as 'the introspective, infinitely sad gaze of a man looking into the abyss of the world's woes'.

Snapping off just six frames, Minihan knew long before the development tank that he had something special: 'I knew it was good, I just didn't know how good.'

Arts Lives: The Man Who Shot Beckett
A profile of photographer John Minihan, directed by David Bickley
RTÉ One, Tuesday, April 10, 10.15pm

As part of RTÉ's Beckett 100 season, David Bickley's Arts Lives film explores the personal and professional relationship of acclaimed photographer John Minihan and Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett. John Minihan is probably the most important Irish photographer alive today, his subjects ranging from Francis Bacon to John Hurt, Princess Diana to William Burroughs. Yet it is his two principle bodies of work, his acclaimed pictures of Athy, and the famous series of photographs he took of Samuel Beckett in London and Paris, that have made John Minihan's reputation.

The Man Who Shot Beckett is both a professional and personal profile of the man actor Stephen Rea singles out for his "blustering sincerity". Tracing John's life and work from humble upbringing in his aunt's home in Athy to his move to London at the age of 12, The Man Who Shot Beckett explores how John Minihan became one of the most respected press photographers in London, and beyond. London made Minihan. Recalling those early "vibrant, exciting" days, John recalls how it was at the Daily Mail, working as an office boy, that he got his first experience of the dark room. One of his first photographs quickly won the Evening Standard Amateur Photography Award, and from there John moved with growing success into a heady new world of celebrity. Photographing, among others, The Beatles, The Who and The Kinks, Minihan's iconic portraits of Chuck Berry and Jackie O., and the infamous transparent Lady Diana, are still recognised today as among the finest press photographs ever taken.

John's was a happy childhood, and in many ways his early years in Athy provided that essential grounding in the commonplace and everyday that was to characterise his most sucessful work. For John, re-visiting the corporation houses of Athy and the fields that were his childhood playground, it seems not much has changed. "The dogs sound the same as they did when I was four or five ...".

It was years later, in the 1970's, that John produced his landmark work, The Last Wake. Shot mainly in Athy, the series explored an Ireland now gone, with many images going on to grace the covers of Irish novels, books and posters. Intimate without being intrusive, John Minihan named his "unknown" subjects, an act that singled him out from his contemporary practitioners. His photograph of Mickey Bowden in Andersons' pub in Athy still graces the Penguin edition of Joyces' Dubliners. For John Minihan, it is as important that Mickey is named as it is important that the photograph was used.

It was The Last Wake that proved to be the key that unlocked the door to Beckett. When Beckett saw the shots, he was instantly struck by the similarity between them and the characters of Beckett's own works. "I met Sam through the photos of Athy ... through the ordinariness of life. He saw more in them that I did!"

John Minihan's second great body of work, the Beckett portfolio, took shape throughout the eighties in London and Paris. "Paris is the city of photography," says John, "the city of street photography." Acutely aware that "photography creates myths and destroys lives", his relationship with Beckett was always one of intense respect. But far from being distant and difficult Beckett was, as Stephen Rea says, "very open to friendship, if you had the nerve ..."John now lives in West Cork and still works with as much energy as he did 30 years ago, recently documenting portraits of artisanal food makers in that area.

From Soho in London to St Germain du Pres in Paris, and on to Athy, The Man Who Shot Beckett  charts the remarkable artistic journey of John Minihan. Featuring world renowned painter Maggie Hambling - who has just completed a portrait of Sam based on one of John's pictures - and Stephen Rea, a lifelong fan, The Man Who Shot Beckett is both an intimate portrait of one of our greatest photographers, and the intriguing story behind two of the twentieth century's great photographic bodies of work.

Waiting for Beckett
The Irish News - 1st April, 2006

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969, Samuel Barclay Beckett is one of Ireland’s most respected writers. Beckett’s reflections gave birth to some of the most poignant poetry of our time. His plays reflected the pessimism of the human condition, while subjecting readers to his wicked sense of humour.

Photographic portraits of him have become artistic masterpieces in themselves. “Beckett’s face is as familiar as his characteristic images. A tree, a country road, tramps... A still photographer’s dream sequence,” commented John Minihan, the man who captured these iconic images of the writer.

In the early 1980s, Irish photojournalist John Minihan gained unprecedented access to the notoriously reclusive Beckett, photographing him in the cafes, pubs, hotel rooms and streets of Paris and London. His friendship with Beckett resulted in some of the best known literary images of the 20th century.

This collection of photographs kick off Beckett’s Centenary celebrations, with a host of artistic events marking 100 years since Beckett’s birth.

An exhibition of his photographs, simply entitled Beckett is premiered in Dublin’s Leinster Gallery today, launched by Samuel Beckett’s publisher John Calder. The exhibition will then travel to London, New York, Paris and Tokyo.

While the media portrayed him a recluse who refused to be interviewed by the press, Minihan found him to be one of the most courteous men he has ever met.

John Minihan is perhaps one of Ireland’s most celebrated photographers. 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.

He has photographed countless famous faces, including Francis Bacon, Yves Saint Laurent, John Hurt, Andy Warhol and the iconic snap of a 19-year-old Lady Diana Spencer in the garden of the nursery she worked at.

Minihan always had a desire to photograph Beckett. “In 1969 I was working in London in the Evening Standard as a photographer. Being Irish, I heard about this reclusive Irish writer living in Paris who had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

“From that moment on I discovered as much as I could about him and made it my business to track him down.

“That happened in London in 1980 when he came over from Paris to direct his friend Rick Cluchey, who is the founder of the San Quentin Drama Workshop,” he recalled.

Beckett is notorious for being camera shy and not speaking to the media. So how did Minihan manage to build up a relationship with this English-language modernist?

“You don’t just photograph Samuel Beckett, you offer him something,” Minihan said.

“I would come across from London annually, or two or three times a year, to photograph my hometown of Athy town and in 1980 when I met him, I’d been photographing it for 20 years.”

The crucial event that pulled Minihan’s Athy work together came in February 1977, when a local woman, Katie Tyrrell, died.

After getting permission to photograph the wake, he photographed the events from her deathbed to the grave.

“A friend told me that he was staying at the Hyde Park Hotel. I didn’t just walk into the hotel and ask for Samuel Beckett because he was staying in this hotel under great secrecy.”

Instead, Minihan sent him a note explaining he was a photographer and asking to show him photographs of Athy in Co Kildare and explain them, with a view to taking his portrait.

“The morning I phoned the hotel and was put through to his room. Sam thanked me for the note and invited me around the next morning at 9 o’clock.”

Minihan was shocked the next morning to be invited up to his room – room 604. There he was met by a smiling, casually dressed Beckett, wearing flip-flops who immediately put the photographer at ease.

“I showed Sam the photographs of The Wake of Katie Tyrrell. They are a stark sequence of black and white photographs and Sam immediately related to those photographs and spent about three quarters of an hour looking at them.

“He appeased me because I was a photographer. I hadn’t an acquiring mind to ask him any personal questions or the relationship about him and his work. Of course he was very familiar with photography. This was a man who understood the camera, light and shade. When you go to see his plays, they are just beautiful plays to photograph for a black and white photographer like myself.”

As a result of their meeting, Beckett invited Minihan to take photographs of rehearsals for Endgame at the Riverside Studio.

They met on a number of other occasions, however it was his photographs of Beckett taken in Paris in 1985 which give him most satisfaction.

Beckett sent a note to Minihan inviting him, on the condition he left his camera at home! However after complying with his wishes on their Saturday morning meeting, Minihan took a chance and brought his trusted camera the following afternoon, as they arranged to meet at Le Petit Cafe.

The coffee cup image, above, is Minihan’s favourite photograph for a number of reasons. He was delighted by the outcome because daylight was against him and Beckett was playing mind games with him.

“I got there an hour early so I would have a space by the window, so if the opportunity came up I could take the photograph. You couldn’t just take a photograph of Sam, it had to be on his instigation. Of course he was really tantalising me because I didn’t think it was going to happen. It wasn’t until ten to five that Sam said to me, ‘Would you like to take a photograph here?’ If you look closely at the photograph you will see the daylight beginning to disappear and the artificial lights coming on.

“Even if I had walked away without a picture, just to be with him then was great. But that picture sums up our relationship. It was our last meeting and it tells a lot about the man.”

The black and white film Minihan used to shoot the photographs of Beckett helped capture the writers various moods and mystery.

“In many ways I respelled the myth about being a recluse. Of course he had an aversion of talking to journalists. He didn’t particularly mind having his portrait taken, in fact I think he sheepishly enjoyed it. He was a man also, who even into old age was very handsome.”

Beckett didn’t inspire Minihan to put to paper but he argues that he didn’t need to as his photograph already tells a story.

“I do what I do. The poetry is in the picture and the narrative is there as well.”

Minihan has also developed a close working relationship with another media shy master of his art – Van Morrison, having got to know him through poetry readings in London.

His photograph forms the cover of Van’s new album Pay the Devil.

“Over the years Van Morrison, unlike any singer songwriter, has an absolutely encyclopedic mind about literature. He’s thoroughly interested in Yeats, Joyce, Beckett – it’s all in Van’s music. I don’t know any other writer who has that kind of belief in the poetry and that comes out in his work.”

While the digital era has transformed the photographic medium, Minihan continues to shoot in film.

“I’m what you call an organic photographer. That sounds pretentious but I still believe best quality happens through film.”

Now living in Cork and working freelance, the only person Minihan now has a desire to photograph is his two week old grandson Charlie.

Photography – Fastest growing segment of the Art Market
Art Price, 2005/2006

The market’s structure is evolving as the contemporary art and photography segments are becoming more popular than other market sectors. The photography segment is now extremely popular among collectors. In 2000 this sector only accounted for 3.4% of sales in volume terms, and $ 50 million (1.7% of the market) in value terms. The segment has become very important with an annual turnover of more than $ 93 million. In October 2005, photography works in New York had never been so lucrative. In seven auctions, Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips together made $ 28.9 million in turnover. They also set an increasing number of records, the highest for the portfolios of Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952): The North American Indian fetched an impressive $ 1.2 million, thereby doubling its high estimations.

On 10-12 October, Christie’s three photography auctions: The Gert Elfering Collection, Robert Mapplethorpe Flowers and Photographs generated a total of $ 14.5 million in turnover. Some 85% of the 409 lots on offer found a buyer. The following artists topped the records at Christie’s: Richard Avedon ($ 464,000, including fees), Irving Penn ($ 307,200), Robert Mapplethorpe ($ 352,000), Peter Beard ($ 192,000), Horst P. Horst ($ 216,000), Henri Cartier-Bresson and Brassaï. Sotheby’s sales were also impressive. The highlight of its two photography auctions in October was the record set for a modern photograph: the sale of a print by Edward Weston (1886-1958) entitled The Breath for $ 720,000 on 10 October. Prior to this record, the highest price paid for a Weston was $ 410,000 for a print entitled Two Shells (1927) sold at Sotheby’s on 17 October 2003. The auction house came up trumps again by equalling the previous day’s record of $ 720,000 thanks to White Angel Bread Line, a photograph by Dorothea Lange (1895-1965). A few weeks later on 8 November, at Christie’s, Cowboy
by Richard Prince, the icon of Marlboro advertisements became the most expensive photograph on the market at $ 1.1 million.

PRESS RELEASE - Details of 5 Worldwide Exhibitions of John Minihan's Work
28th March, 2006

John Minihan (born Dublin 1946) is one of the world's most celebrated photographers, famous for literary portraits and landscapes. His close friendship with Samuel Beckett produced some of the most remarkable photographs ever taken of the writer. John Minihan spent his early years in Athy, County Kildare. When he was eleven, his family moved to London where he went on to become an office boy on the London Evening News, an apprentice darkroom printer on the Daily Mail, and the youngest staff photographer on the Evening Standard where he stayed for almost thirty years.

During his London years, John returned often to Athy, Ireland for holidays and it was there that he started to take photographs purely for pleasure and later for documentation purposes, snapping family, friends, landscapes and scenes of everyday life. Since his first Athy photographs were shown at the Royal Court Theatre in London’s Sloane Square in 1971, his work “described as poignant and sublime” has been exhibited in galleries around the world, from Paris to Rio de Janeiro.

To celebrate the centenary of Samuel Beckett’s birth, a series of exhibitions will take place around the world. The exhibitions will feature black and white Beckett photographs signed by the photographer. The premier exhibition commences in Dublin’s Leinster Gallery, 1st  – 14th April, followed by Irish Centre, New York, 15thApril- 5th May. Additional exhibitions will take place in The Apartment, Notting Hill, London, 25th April – 27th May 2006, The Victoria Art Gallery Bath, 5th April – 7th May and The Iverni Gallery Kenmare, 27th May – 10th June 2006. Further exhibitions will take place in Paris and Tokyo in September 2006.

In describing John Minihan’s work, John Banville has said:

“Looking at the work of John Minihan one understands immediately why Samuel Beckett, that most private and publicity-shy of artists, entirely trusted him, and allowed him to become, in effect, his official photographer.

Minihan’s gift is to be at once penetrating and discreet, probing and respectful, close-up and impersonal. His photographs offer us deep insights into Beckett the man while maintaining intact the essential mystery, which is the mystery of art, and the Beckett he presents to our gaze is both mortal being and the timeless artist”.

Waiting for Godot's creator to say 'yes'
The Sunday Independent, 26 March 2006

IF ANYONE imprinted the image of the Irish writer Samuel Beckett on the public mind it was John Minihan, a former newspaper photographer whose work is now regarded as art.

"I feel I put Sam in context - that was the way he wanted to be seen," says Minihan, who pursued the Irish writer with tenacity, from 1969 until he was allowed to take his photograph in Paris in 1980.
His image of Beckett - the lined, craggy face, the penetrating eyes, the thin frame and the wavy grey hair - has come to symbolise the man whose centenary is being celebrated in literary circles in Dublin, where he was born; in his real home, Paris; and in other great cities around the world.
"What I didn't know was that I had been photographing Beckettian characters long before I even knew it - old women in Athy, men in bars, that sort of thing," says Minihan.

"Samuel Beckett's face has become an icon, and many distinguished photographers, including Brassai, Jane Bown, Robert Doisneau, Jerry Bauer, Man Ray and Richard Avedon, have caught the head 'like an Aztec eagle' in different poses and moods. But this photograph by John Minihan was taken when Beckett's attention was distracted and catches the introspective, infinitely sad gaze of a man looking into an abyss of the world's woes," says John Calder, his publisher.

"The Nobel prizewinner became the icon staring into life's mysteries," says Sir Peter Hall in the catalogue for a new exhibition of Minihan's work in Dublin. "Beckett understood more than most men." But contrary to the literary image, he was also "the most delightful man to share a glass of Guinness with . . . "

The world premiere of Minihan's Beckett photographs will be in the Leinster Gallery in Dublin next Saturday, April 1; the exhibition will go on to London, New York, Kenmare, Paris and Tokyo.
A print by John Minihan was sold at the auction house Whyte's for over €7,000, although it had an estimate of just €800. In the US the value of art photographs has jumped from $20m to nearly $100m in five years. Photographs are reaching prices once reserved for well-known artists. "Maybe it has something to do with architecture and the way people want to design their homes," says one collector. "Whatever the reason, photographs just seem to be more saleable at the moment."

John Minihan is one of those benefiting from the new trend. After meeting Beckett in London in 1980, where he was overseeing a play, Minihan got a letter from Samuel Beckett dated "10/4/85" which invited him to visit him in Paris but . . . "promise to leave your camera at home". Being a photographer, he did nothing of the sort. On the Sunday he got the iconic image of the author of Waiting for Godotoff his guard in a Paris cafe.

"All his plays are made for the camera - sequences of silence and light. Beckett once write a script for Hollywood called Film- he didn't fear the camera, because it sees only what it sees, and he felt comfortable. That was the way he wanted to be seen," says John Minihan. That's the way he will be seen in this new exhibition.

Ireland: John Minihan
The Sunday Times, 12 March 2006

In La Closerie des Lilas, on Boulevard du Montparnasse in Paris’s 14th arrondissement, a small metal plate marks the table at which Samuel Beckett sat during the eight years he frequented the expensive brasserie. He preferred to go there in the afternoons and tended to drink whiskey. When he ate there, he often ordered the same dish, long gone from the menu, a variation on rack of lamb. In this, as in many things, Beckett was a creature of habit.

When he wearied of La Closerie, mobbed by affluent artistic types keen to bask in the atmosphere that Hemingway, Picasso and Toulouse-Lautrec had enjoyed before them, Beckett shifted allegiance to the PLM, a large, modern, anonymous hotel near his apartment on Boulevard St Jacques. As with La Closerie, when he ate there he invariably ordered the same dish (liver and chips). Mostly, however, he used the PLM to meet friends for drinks, and it was there, in December 1985, four years before his death, that he met the photographer John Minihan for the last time.

They had known each other for only five years. Minihan had wanted to photograph Beckett for more than a decade before they met, and had made a tentative effort to contact him in the early 1970s, but had written to the wrong address. When they eventually met, in London in the summer of 1980, it began a relationship that yielded several of the best images of Beckett, culminating in the definitive portrait, taken in the PLM in 1985.

Other photographers translated Beckett’s aquiline features into iconic images, invariably detached from any context. The most notable are Richard Avedon’s sterile portraits, shot hurriedly against a plain sheet backdrop in the PLM, which have been used as the lead images in the Irish celebration of the centenary of Beckett’s birth, on April 13.

Minihan’s photographs, by contrast, recovered Beckett from the merely iconographic, placing him in context and allowing the human figure to emerge. In this, Minihan was practising a style he had refined since the early 1960s, when he began documenting life in Athy, Co Kildare, where he grew up, with the pictures that earned him Beckett’s trust.

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. He first made contact with Beckett when he was directing Endgame at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, west London, in the summer of 1980. A friend told Minihan that Beckett was staying at the Hyde Park hotel. He left a note for the playwright, rang the next morning and was put through.

“That was our first communication,” says Minihan. “‘Mr Beckett.’ ‘Mr Minihan, thank you for your note. I would love to see the photographs of the wake.’ My first impression was of a gentle voice. He put me immediately at ease. I was used to photo editors bollocking me, so when I went to phone anybody I’d be a bit terrified. But here was this calming voice inviting me to come and see him.
“The following morning, I was told by the receptionist to go up to room 604. At the room, Mr Beckett opened the door with a smile on his face. He put me immediately at ease. He was dressed casually, wearing flip-flops. The room was a small one at the back of the hotel, overlooking the park.
“We sat down and I showed him the photographs. He looked at each one for a long time, and asked me about the people in them. He said, ‘These are important pictures.’ At the end of the meeting, after half an hour, I asked if I could go down to the Riverside and take some photographs there. He agreed, so I spent the next few days at the theatre.”

Beckett, says Minihan, was aware of himself as a photographic subject. “He had a great face for black-and-white and he certainly posed,” says Minihan. “The first time I took out the camera in room 604, he posed. The way he held his glasses, for example, may look casual but was deliberate.”
Minihan also photographed Beckett in London in 1984, but pushed for another shoot the following year, in advance of Beckett’s 80th birthday. “I don’t think he realised, when we first met, that I had the tenacity to pursue him and maybe even become a bit of a pain in the arse,” says Minihan.
Beckett agreed to meet Minihan in December 1985, but only, he said in a note, as long as he left his camera at home. “On the Saturday morning at 11, I rang the bell of his apartment and he came down,” says Minihan. “I had sussed out a cute little cafe across from the Métro station, but he said no and walked me down to the PLM. I brought him over some whiskey. Bushmills. He was delighted with that. Sam was very chatty: he was always very animated.”

Minihan gently pushed to do a picture, and Beckett relented, inviting him back the following day at 3pm. On the Sunday, he arrived at the cafe at two o’clock (the self-portrait shown here was taken earlier that day in the window of a shop) and took a table by the window, to give him the light he needed.

“He walked in on the stroke of three and when he saw me smiled: he knew exactly why I was sitting in that spot,” says Minihan. “We had a few coffees and talked, and as the time went by I could see the daylight beginning to go. It wasn’t until ten to five that Sam said to me, ‘Would you like to take a photograph here?’ Another five minutes and the opportunity would have been lost. Sam knew it and was tantalising me.

“I took the Hasselblad out. I had framed the picture in my head; I knew exactly what I wanted. But Samuel Beckett orchestrated that picture. As I focused the lens, Sam moved to stub out his cheroot. His demeanour changed immediately. It was as if I had ceased to exist. He moved his left hand down onto his knee and turned his gaze away.”

Minihan took another few shots outside on the boulevard. The entire shoot comprised just six frames. “Sam just said, God bless, shook my hand and departed. I stood there overjoyed. I didn’t know what I had got, but I knew it was good. When I got it developed, it was better than I had expected.”