John Minihan is an Irish photographer, 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 the age of 15 he won the Evening Standard amateur photography competition. 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.
The work of Minihan in Athy makes up a large part of his canon. Minihan began taking photos in Athy when he was 16. The photos are an attempt to document the lives of the ordinary people of the town in their day-to-day business and also in times of joy and sadness, notably during the wake of a woman called Katy Tyrrell.
In between documenting Athy on visits home, Minihan continued his career on Fleet Street, which included the iconic snap of the 19-year-old Lady Diana Spencer in the garden of the nursery at which she worked, the morning sun to her back, her legs in silhouette through her skirt. Diana had just been announced as the Prince of Wales's love interest and photographers raced to take her photo, Minihan having the fortune to turn up first.
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. Minihans photos of Beckett are some of his best known, one in particular is described as one of the greatest photos of the twentieth century. William S. Burroughs once referred to Minihan as "a painless photographer".
Minihan is perhaps best known for his photographs of Beckett. Minihan first expressed a desire to photograph Beckett in 1969, following Beckett's winning of the Nobel Prize for literature, having noticed that all the available photos of Beckett were of a poor quality;
'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.'
Minihan first encountered Beckett in London in 1980, while Beckett was working on a production of one of his own plays, Endgame. Minihan met Beckett in the Hyde Park hotel and showed him some of his photos of Athy to break the ice. The two met on a number of occasions over the next few years, but it was not until 1985 that they met in Paris. They arranged to meet in the restaurant of the Hotel PLM, a regular haunt of Beckett. At ten to five, with the light fading, Minihan took the photo that would go on to be called by some as the photograph of the twentieth century. John Calder credited Minihan with capturing,
'the introspective, infinitely sad gaze of a man looking into the abyss of the world's woes'.
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 currently lives and works in County Cork.
Jack Butler Yeats RHA was an Irish artist and Olympic medalist. W. B. Yeats was his brother.
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish novelist, dramatist, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. His literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal and tragicomic experiences of life, often coupled with black comedy and nonsense. His work became increasingly minimalist as his career progressed, involving more aesthetic and linguistic experimentation, with techniques of repetition and self-reference. He is considered one of the last modernist writers, and one of the key figures in what Martin Esslin called the Theatre of the Absurd.
Henry Patrick Clarke RHA was an Irish stained-glass artist and book illustrator. Born in Dublin, he was a leading figure in the Irish Arts and Crafts Movement.
Brian Bourke is an Irish artist.
Gisèle Freund was a German-born French photographer and photojournalist, famous for her documentary photography and portraits of writers and artists. Her best-known book, Photographie et société (1974), is about the uses and abuses of the photographic medium in the age of technological reproduction. In 1977, she became president of the French Association of Photographers, and in 1981, she took the official portrait of French President François Mitterrand.
Murphy, first published in 1938, is an avant-garde novel as well as the third work of prose fiction by the Irish author and dramatist Samuel Beckett. The book was Beckett's second published prose work after the short-story collection More Pricks than Kicks and his unpublished first novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women. It was written in English, rather than the French of much of Beckett's later writing. After many rejections, it was published by Routledge on the recommendation of Beckett's painter friend Jack Butler Yeats.
Douglas Morley Kirkland was a Canadian-born American photographer. He was noted for his photographs of celebrities, especially the ones he took of Marilyn Monroe several months before her death.
Robert Carlos Clarke was a British-Irish photographer who made erotic images of women as well as documentary, portrait and commercial photography.
Gabriel Rosenstock is an Irish writer who works chiefly in the Irish language. A member of Aosdána, he is poet, playwright, haikuist, tankaist, essayist, and author/translator of over 180 books, mostly in Irish. Born in Kilfinane, County Limerick, he currently resides in Dublin.
John Deakin was an English photographer, best known for his work centred on members of Francis Bacon's Soho inner circle. Bacon based a number of famous paintings on photographs he commissioned from Deakin, including Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, Henrietta Moraes on a Bed and Three Studies of Lucian Freud.
Estella Francis Solomons (1882–1968) was one of the leading Irish artists of her generation.
Patrick Swift (1927–1983) was an Irish painter who worked in Dublin, London and the Algarve, Portugal.
Reginald Gray was an Irish portrait artist. He studied at The National College of Art (1953) and then moved to London, becoming part of the School of London led by Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach. In 1960, he painted a portrait of Bacon which is in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London. He subsequently painted portraits from life of writers, musicians and artists such as Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Brendan Behan, Garech Browne, Derry O'Sullivan, Alfred Schnittke, Ted Hughes, Rupert Everett and Yves Saint Laurent. In 1993 Gray had a retrospective exhibition at UNESCO Paris and in 2006, his portrait "The White Blouse" won the Sandro Botticelli Prize in Florence, Italy.
Patrick Anthony Hennessy RHA was an Irish realist painter. He was known for his highly finished still lifes, landscapes and trompe l'oeil paintings. The hallmark of his style was his carefully observed realism and his highly finished surfaces, the result of a virtuoso painting technique. He was brought up in Arbroath by his mother and step-father, his father having been killed during World War One. He attended Dundee School of Art where he met his lifelong companion, the painter Henry (Harry) Robertson Craig. Two of his paintings were accepted in 1939 at the Royal Scottish Academy for their Annual Exhibition. For the next 29 years he lived in Ireland with extended trips abroad. He was elected a member of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1949. The Hendriks Gallery in Dublin and the Guildhall Galleries in Chicago were the main outlets for his work. In the late 1960s he moved permanently to Tangier and then, after suffering ill health, to the Algarve. He died in London.
Walter D. Asmus is a German theatre director.
David Martin Gamble is a British-American photographer and artist known for his portrait and journalistic photography.
Eamonn Doyle is an Irish photographer, electronic music producer, DJ, and owner/manager of the D1 Recordings record label. He has produced a number of records of his own music. His self-published photo-books include the trilogy i (2014), ON (2015) and End (2016), set in Dublin where he lives. He founded and ran the Dublin Electronic Arts Festival from 2001 to 2009.
Charles John Engledow was a British military officer and an Irish nationalist politician and Member of Parliament (MP) in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom for the North Kildare, where he sat as an anti-Parnellite from 1895 to 1900.
Eoin O'Brien LRCP&SI, FRCP, FRCP, is an Irish clinical scientist. He has published extensively on hypertension as one of the major causes of death and disability in society.. Alongside his medical career, O'Brien has contributed to the field of literary criticism and biography. He has written books on writers and artists including Samuel Beckett, Nevill Johnson and Con Leventhal.
Enda Bowe is an Irish photographer that lives and works in London. His publications include Kilburn Cherry (2013) and At Mirrored River (2016). Bowe was joint winner of the SOLAS Ireland award in 2015 and won second prize in the 2018 and 2019 Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize. He has had solo exhibitions in Carlow and in Dublin.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
