John Minihan is one of Ireland’s most celebrated photographers. Born in Dublin in 1946 and raised in Athy, Co. Kildare, he left for London at age nine, and, in 1962, spent 5 years as an apprentice in the Daily Mail darkroom, making up chemicals, copying, printing and tea making. At weekends, he would go out and photograph the bands of the 60s: The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who and The Animals, spending much time in the jazz clubs of Soho. This marked the beginning of a long and prolific career that spans over six decades.
Minihan is one of the great chroniclers of his era, capturing Lady Diana Spencer on the morning her engagement broke, Francis Bacon and William Burroughs together, Edna O’Brien lounging on a windowsill, and Samuel Beckett in the fading light of a Paris café, a portrait many regard as among the defining images of the twentieth century.
But it was Athy that shaped his eye first, and it’s Athy he returned to for thirty-four years, photographing the wakes, weddings and ordinary Sunday mornings of the town he never stopped calling home. Here, Minihan created a body of work devoted to love, life and death, one he counts among his proudest achievements.
Now living in Skibbereen, Minihan has turned his lens on west Cork, capturing the people, the landscape, the light and the shadows. Skibbereen Arts Festival is proud to present Minihan at 80, an exhibition celebrating this remarkable chapter in the life of a photographer who has spent a lifetime looking closely at the world and, as he puts it himself, staying in the light.