![\"Samuel](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/5057876_12_articleinlinemobile_John_20Minihan_20Samuel_20Beckett_1_.jpg\" "\\"Samuel")
Samuel Beckett photographed in Paris in 1985, by John Minihan. Picture: John Minihan\/Courtesy of UCC<\/p>\n\u201cCancer is gothic,\u201d says John Minihan. \u201cIt likes pessimism. So when I look at myself in the mirror, I always tell myself I\u2019m looking good. It doesn’t like that.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Over the past few years, Minihan has undergone a number of gruelling procedures at the South Infirmary in Cork, but his cancer is now in remission. \u201cWith all the radiography and chemotherapy, I went down to about 53 kilos at one stage,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut, you know, I’ve always felt \u2014 and I tell people this, unashamedly \u2014 that I’m God’s photographer. And I wasn’t going anywhere just yet, I’m still climbing that mountain.\u201d<\/p>\n
Minihan certainly has plenty to live for. The University of Liverpool is producing a new book of his photographs of Samuel Beckett in September, and his work is currently being showcased in Visual Poetry, the very first solo exhibition by a photographer at the National Gallery of Ireland.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It features his iconic images of Beckett, the painter Francis Bacon and the author Edna O\u2019Brien, but also a selection of more intimate, domestic scenes from his native Athy, Co Kildare.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Samuel Beckett photographed in Paris in 1985, by John Minihan. Picture: John Minihan\/Courtesy of UCC<\/p>\n
Minihan, who recently turned 80, remembers Athy, where he grew up on Plewman\u2019s Terrace, with great affection. He was reared there from infancy by his aunt and uncle, the couple he still regards as his parents.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cMy father died before I was born,\u201d he says, \u201cand I only really met my mother once, in Dublin, when I was about seven. There was a picture of herself and my father on the mantelpiece, and I remember her saying, you\u2019re not as handsome as your father. It wasn\u2019t the most loving thing you can say to a child, was it?\u201d<\/p>\n
They never had any kind of relationship, and he did not attend her funeral. \u201cI didn\u2019t know the lady. I never had so much as a Christmas card from her. I don\u2019t have a chip on my shoulder about it or anything, but basically, it was abandonment.\u201d<\/p>\n
Minihan was 12 when he and his adoptive parents moved to London. \u201cMy aunt got a job as caretaker for a house in Baron\u2019s Court. There were about 12 ladies living in the house, all spinsters that worked in the civil service, and we had a flat in the basement. They were rather glamorous ladies, and when my aunt was cleaning the rooms, I would go in and look at their photographs.\u201d<\/p>\n
A few years later, aged 15, he won an Evening Standard photography competition for an image he took of two anonymous men at the Whispering Gallery in St Paul\u2019s Cathedral. He soon secured an apprenticeship as a photographer with another newspaper, the Daily Mail, before becoming, at 21, the youngest ever staff photographer with the Standard.\u00a0<\/p>\n
London in the 1960s was the epicentre of a cultural revolution, and he got to photograph the Rolling Stones, The Who, Jimi Hendrix and many others. Much as he loved being part of the London scene, he always returned to Athy two or three times a year.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThere were 31 or 32 corporation houses on Plewman\u2019s Terrace,\u201d he says. \u201cEveryone who lived there was different, but there was a certain neighbourliness about it, irrespective of how poor you were. It somebody died on the terrace \u2014 as they did, of course, when I was growing up \u2014 it was a real occasion.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“You’d see these women dressing the body of the deceased. The blinds would be pulled down, and you\u2019d see the silhouetted figures moving around. I was mopping up all this stuff as a child; my head would be in through the railing.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 1977, a local publican named Bertie Doyle helped him secure permission to photograph the wake of a woman named Katy Tyrrell.\u00a0<\/p>\n
![\"After](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/5057882_12_articleinlinemobile_Minihan_2c_20_27After_20the_20Burial_20of_20Mrs._20Katy_20Tyrell_2c_2.jpeg\" "\\"After")
After the Burial of Mrs Katy Tyrell, in Athy in 1977. Picture: John Minihan\/Courtesy of UCC<\/p>\n
He hadn\u2019t known her personally, but over the course of two nights and three days, he captured the whole ritual of the wake in her home \u2014 the clocks stopped, the mirror covered in a white sheet, the body dressed in a Legion of Mary burial shroud \u2014 along with her family\u2019s reactions to her passing. The series became the basis of a celebrated exhibition and a book.<\/p>\n
Three years later, he showed the photographs to Samuel Beckett when the publicity-shy author was in London to direct a production of his play, Endgame, at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith. Beckett was so impressed that he agreed to let Minihan take his portrait.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It was the first of several meetings, the last being a rendezvous at a caf\u00e9 in Paris in December 1985, at which Minihan took what is arguably the most celebrated image of Beckett, with his empty coffee cup and an ashtray full of cigarette butts before him on the table.<\/p>\n
Long after Beckett\u2019s death in 1989, Minihan has continued to photograph productions of his plays, most recently a production in York of Krapp\u2019s Last Tape, starring Gary Oldman. He has even photographed Beckett\u2019s car, a surprisingly jaunty Citreon 2CV.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI never got in the car with Sam,\u201d he says. \u201cBut John Calder, his publisher, did so often. He told me Sam could easily have killed him, the way he sped around all those side streets in Paris.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter Sam died, his car came up for auction. I can\u2019t say who, but someone in Ireland bought it, and he allowed me to photograph it, inside and out. The butts of Sam\u2019s Gauloises were still in the ashtray. I photographed the log book as well. It gave Sam\u2019s address, on Boulevard Saint-Jacques, just a five-minute walk from where I\u2019d photographed him in that caf\u00e9.\u201d<\/p>\n
Minihan still thinks the Citroen 2CV should have been the first vehicle to cross the Samuel Beckett Bridge when it opened in Dublin in 2009. \u201cThey could have got Sam\u2019s nephew, Edward Beckett, to drive it. That would have been a lovely moment, wouldn\u2019t it? It would have been fantastic to photograph that, but it didn\u2019t happen, I\u2019m afraid.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Minihan\u2019s exhibition at the National Gallery will have two rotations, with a new body of work being displayed from June to October.\u00a0<\/p>\n
One of the photographs he wants included is a portrait of his old friend Edna O\u2019Brien with Van Morrison from 2014, when Morrison put on a series of concerts in Dublin, Belfast and London, with guests such as O\u2019Brien, Michael Longley and Gerald Dawe reading his lyrics.<\/p>\n
\u201cI asked to photograph Van and Edna together,\u201d he says, \u201cand she turned up with an old vinyl copy of Astral Weeks. We were in the dressing room, and the two of them were laughing like kids. The lightbulb above them was shining on the album, and there\u2019s all these circles, from when people put down their wine glasses at Edna\u2019s parties.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"\u00a0John](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/5057879_8_articleinlinemobile_John_20Minihan_20with_20his_20children_2c_20Siobhan_20and_20Bosco_20Mi.jpeg\" "\\"\u00a0John")
\u00a0John Minihan with his children, Siobhan and Bosco, at the National Gallery of Ireland. Picture: Abe Neihum<\/p>\n
Minihan has been back living in Ireland since 1996, when he turned 50, his editor at the Evening Standard, Max Hastings, having arranged for him to receive a timely redundancy package.\u00a0<\/p>\n
He settled in Ballydehob initially, but has since moved to an old schoolhouse outside Skibbereen with his wife Deirdre. He enjoys a great relationship with his three children.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy daughter Siobh\u00e1n lives in Leicester, and has given me three grandchildren,\u201d he says. \u201cMy son Bosco works in St Martin\u2019s Theatre in London, and my other son Emmet is driving cranes in the desert in Australia. They\u2019re all doing well, and I\u2019m so grateful for that.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
These days, he is happiest photographing nature. \u201cI had an angiogram last year, and they told me I have heart disease. But I think of that as being like having moss around the heart.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“When I\u2019m out walking, I might touch an oak that\u2019s 200 years old, and it almost comes alive. So I\u2019m going to be photographing a lot of trees with moss on them from now on.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have every reason to believe I\u2019ll die in my 80s,\u201d he continues. \u201cIt\u2019s like Yeats said, as a man grows older, he thinks of the impending darkness. But I know I\u2019ll be going to a better place. I\u2019ve always gone to Mass, I\u2019ve always had faith. Catholicism is like an insurance policy around you; it doesn\u2019t cost anything to believe.\u201d<\/p>\n