On a Sunday evening in February 1977 John Minihan arrived in Athy, Co Kildare, on one of his regular visits to the town. He had a drink in Doyle's Bar and went to bed. The next morning the bar owner, Bertie Doyle, contacted him to tell him that a local woman, Katy Tyrrell, had died in the early hours of the morning. Minihan was well known in Athy. He had spent the first 11 years of his life there and had revisited it frequently. From the early 1960s he invariably brought a camera with him and recorded the day-to-day life of the town and its people.
Doyle told him that Katy Tyrrell would be waked and, if Minihan was interested in photographing the wake, he would be willing to talk to the family. That is how Minihan came to spend three days and two nights making a comprehensive photographic record of what was, as far as he knows, the last wake in Athy. "Since then, a funeral parlour has opened in the town. The local name for it is the Bed With No Breakfast. By one of those quirks of local history, it stands next to what used to be the Dreamland Ballroom."
Some years later, preparing to write an introduction to the book that features many of Minihan's Athy pictures, Shadows From the Pale, Eugene McCabe was looking through the photographs when he came to the images of Katy Tyrrell's wake. "My God, I thought, she's a North American Indian: Cree, Sioux, Blackfoot, Iroquois, here in Athy being waked Irishstyle . . . as noble in repose as a dead queen." And indeed Katy Tyrrell, laid out on her bed, rosary beads in hand, does look extraordinarily like a North American Indian. Minihan explained to him that Katy Tyrrell was as Irish as either of them.
"Of course it had struck me," he elaborates, "and it did so particularly because some of the first photographs I saw that really impressed me were by a man called Edward S. Curtis, a pioneering photographer who photographed all the North American Indian tribes. His pictures are extraordinary, but he also kept a diary of their rituals. Some of those photographs have never really left me." In fact, the example of Curtis was instrumental in his embarking on what was to become a labour of love, his long-term documentation of life and death in Athy. "So it was very strange for me to be there, looking at Katy Tyrrell and thinking of Curtis. It seemed to complete a circle in some way."
Minihan's twin photographic passions are Athy and Irish writers. His photographs of Katy Tyrrell's wake later became his introduction to Samuel Beckett, who he had wanted to meet and photograph for a long time. In 1980 Beckett was in London to direct a production of Endgame at the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, and was staying at the Hyde Park Hotel. "I felt I had to have something to offer him." Minihan sent him a note outlining his Athy project and Beckett agreed to meet him, saying that he'd particularly like to see the photographs of the wake.
They struck up a fruitful acquaintanceship. "I never talked about his work, I didn't think I knew enough about it. We'd talk about ordinary things, like the price of a pint in Dublin." Invited along to rehearsals, Minihan took some very fine photographs of Beckett. He photographed him again in London in 1984, and then in Paris in 1985. "I got a postcard saying he'd be delighted to meet me in Paris, provided I left my camera at home. I don't think he believed I could really do that. In fact I wanted to get a new portrait of him in time for his 80th birthday the following year." He got his portrait and his Beckett photographs have been widely exhibited and were published in book form in 1995.
Minihan was born in Dublin in 1946. He never knew his parents. His father died before he was born. When he was four months old, his mother brought him to Athy and left him in the care of her sister and her husband. After that she went to England. His aunt and uncle became his parents. "I mean that literally. I absolutely think of them as my parents." He has never had any further contact with his mother. "You see, she got married again in England and started another family. There's been no contact there - it hasn't bothered me particularly, but that's the state of play really. She's still alive, in her eighties now. I wouldn't know her if I met her. She had four other sons. They have made contact, but I've never seen my real mother, and I don't think she's had any wish to see me particularly."
Even now, to recount this must, you think, be painful for him. But he tells it quickly, without a lot of emotion, and it becomes clear that he's rushing to emphasise that it's okay, he's just outlining the facts, and that any trauma is long since over and done with. He is adamant that he has no need or desire to see his mother, even now. "I know that might sound strange, but quite genuinely it doesn't bother me. There it is."
Perhaps this exceptional early history accounts in part for his fierce identification with Athy, for the way that, against all the odds, the very fabric of the town and the lives of its inhabitants became his emotional anchor through the years. Even with the book long published, and now that he is living in Ireland again, Athy still is, if to a lesser extent, part of his routine. He still goes there about once a month and takes photographs.
Yet he left with his aunt and uncle when he was 11 years old, and it would have been easy for him to forget about it and become absorbed in his new life in London. "My aunt and uncle were just ordinary impoverished Irish folk, people who didn't have a pot to piss in, basically, and they had to go to England to try and find work." They remained there for the rest of their lives. "When my uncle died he was buried in London. But before she died, in 1980, my aunt expressed a wish to be buried at home in Athy, so we did that."
Minihan, meanwhile, became an office boy with the Evening News when he was 15. The following year he accepted a darkroom apprenticeship with the Daily Mail. He was five years with the Mail and then took a job as a staff photographer on the London Evening Standard. He didn't particularly nurture any ambitions to become a photographer.
Yet he is clearly at home with a camera in his hands, and that must have become apparent pretty quickly. His pictures have a relaxed, unforced sense of composition and balance that comes naturally to many of the best photographers. The images seem to form themselves before the lens. But he decries any mention of having a particular gift.
"It didn't seem strange to me to become a photographer because by then it was what I knew. When I was with the Mail I took a photograph of two men in the Whispering Gallery of St Paul's - everyone took pictures there - and it won me five guineas in the Evening Standard Amateur Cameraman competition. I think that was 1961. They printed the picture and I haven't been out of print since."
In Athy he'd been taught by the Christian Brothers, but after that he only had a couple of years secondary schooling in London. "The wonderful thing about photography for me is that it was my education. The camera became my life. I was thrown into a world I never could have imagined. I'd go from covering a fashion show to photographing a serial killer. It took me into every area of experience."
Over the years he has covered most of the big stories. "Everything from the Krays to Fred West - Fred West was the last story I covered for the Standard." The most upsetting by far was the killing of Jamie Bulger. "Hardened hacks broke down in tears. The killing remains incomprehensible to me. It's by far the most depressing story I have ever covered."
His work often took him to Ireland. "If I was in Northern Ireland I'd make sure and come down to Athy." He was here as well on the trail of Shergar with Max Hastings. He actually managed to stay in Athy while covering the Herrema kidnap siege.
In September 1980 Nigel Dempster ran a small story about Lady Diana Spencer seeing Prince Charles. At the time she was working in a Pimlico kindergarten, and early in the morning Minihan was dispatched to get a photograph. He knocked on the door and proposed photographing her with the children. She checked with the parents and agreed. As far as he was concerned: "It was a happy, fun, picture." But it earned a certain notoriety because her skirt was partially translucent. It made the front page the same day and marked a sea change in royal coverage.
"Before Diana, the royals were a fairly bland bunch of people. When Diana arrived on the scene that changed completely. New guys appeared. They call them paparazzi, but they weren't paparazzi. The paparazzi in the 1960s had to be competent photographers, but these were guys who had money to buy very expensive equipment, and they are like bounty-hunters, really. They've done a lot to discredit bona fide photographers like myself, who are now looked upon as virtual outcasts. I despise them for what they do. When I took that photo of Diana it was one-to-one. After the engagement I was just one of dozens, standing on a ladder in a pig-pen, working with a 300-millimetre lens."
During his time in London he was married and divorced. "My wife was an Armenian from Iran. We have a daughter, Siobhan. She's 18 now and lives in London." He and his partner, Hammond, a painter from New Zealand, have been together now for 11 years. They have two children, both boys, aged four and eight, "plus dogs and cats". They've been living in Ballydehob for two-and-a-half years, and he reckons they've settled there. They chose Ballydehob because he had visited west Cork many times, usually to see writers during the summers. "So many of them lived in Kinsale at one stage or another - Derek Mahon, Aidan Higgins, Alannah Hopkin, Stan Gebler Davies, who was a very dear friend, Desmond O'Grady the poet, they all lived around there. I couldn't afford to live in Kinsale, it's far too expensive, but Ballydehob was waiting for me."
After nearly 30 years he was made redundant from the Standard. "I wasn't unhappy about it. There comes a point when you have to give up chasing ambulances and fire brigades and do what you want to do." His casual disregard for what he calls "the day job" is disconcerting. He simply shrugs it off and seems weary of even talking about the details, in marked contrast to his animated enthusiasm for Irish writers and, more than anything, Athy. And it's not at all that he feels resentful.
"The things I've done journalistically haven't really interested me particularly. When I was working, I always did what was necessary. But for me the importance of Fleet Street was that it allowed me to do the things I wanted to do. It wouldn't have happened if I hadn't had the job. But Athy, that is my passion. I always wanted to be a documentarian photographer, a visual essayist of my town."
Once he joined the Daily Mail, when he came back to Ireland he always came back with a camera. "I remember in 1961 being asked to photograph the wedding of Bow Rochfort in Athy. It was a house wedding. I remember seeing boxes and boxes of Guinness stacked up against the wall of the toilet outside and thinking, I should be photographing this, it should all be recorded."
In many respects Shadows From the Pale is a memorial to an Ireland that was changing irrevocably even as the photographs were being taken. To leaf through its pages is a curious, elegiac experience, not least because it records aspects of Ireland that would probably not be mourned by its subjects. These people look as if they had hard lives and endured a lot. Like Katy Tyrrell, many of them, elderly when Minihan started taking photographs, have since died. It is extremely sad to witness the progress of Mary Byrne, a handsome woman with piercing, intelligent eyes, from health to a bed in the County Home.
"Someone described the book to me recently as an essay in morbidity in black-and-white. I've even been criticised for photographing old people. I was there recently, and there's a new burger joint. It used to be a clothes shop, that I had photographed many times. I had a look, and there were two teenage girls in there. They were sitting, vacantly drinking coffee from plastic cups. What struck me was that they weren't even talking, they were just staring blankly ahead in this horrible plastic place. To me that's morbid. I'd rather photograph someone who has something to offer, who has experienced something, who has a bit of life in their eyes."
He recognises that the Athy of his photographs is already substantially changed in lots of different ways. "Athy is now a part of Dublin's suburbia. In 1961 or 1962 I'd come over to Dublin and stay in the old Jurys. It would take me three-and-a-half hours to get to Athy by bus. Now I can leave Doyle's Bar in Athy and be in the centre of Dublin in 40 minutes. A lot of people in Athy now work in Dublin, pick up their videos in Dublin and arrive home for the evening."
Photography, for him, as it was for Edward Curtis, is a way of recording and in some sense preserving traditions. "That why I'm still looking and still taking photographs. But I don't have the same entree into the town as I did before. There is more suspicion. People now are more conscious of how they are perceived. They may not want to be associated with the perception I might have of them. I have to respect that."
An Unweaving of Rainbows: Images of Irish Writers, by John Minihan is published by Souvenir Press (£20 in UK). Shadows From the Pale: Portrait of an Irish Town, by John Minihan, is published by Secker & Warburg (£20 in UK).
