The Greatest Generation Remembered

Irish photographer John Minihan's portraits of the famous, including Samuel Beckett, Edna O'Brien, and Francis Bacon, have established him as one of the finest portrait photographers of his generation. This week the Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister) Brian Cowen will open a new exhibition of Minihan's work chronicling the golden years of America's most elderly Irish immigrants at the Irish Arts Center in Manhattan. CAHIR O'DOHERTY talks to the celebrated portrait artist about his legendary work.

IRISH photographer John Minihan, 62, has photographed many of the world's most famous faces, and his enthusiasm for his art is undimmed. After decades at the top of his game Minihan isn't fazed by the brittle glamour of the latest movie stars. It's always the person beneath the glitter that he wants to capture, and in this he always succeeds.

Known first and foremost as a portrait photographer, many of Minihan's subjects are well known figures in the artistic and literary worlds, but he's by no means confined himself to such upscale company. These days Minihan's as excited at the prospect of photographing an Irish immigrant in the Bronx as other photographers are about the chance to photograph Hollywood royalty.

Born in Athy, Co. Kildare in 1946, Minihan began his apprenticeship in his craft at The Daily Mail in London at the tender age of 15. Working in the newspaper's darkroom, he learned every part of the photographer's art in an era when media images arrived by the hour and the turnaround was swift. It was the ideal training environment for a budding photographer.

"I was one of 10 runners on the editorial floor of the evening news," he tells the Irish Voice. "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 began my life as a photographer."

This week Minihan's latest exhibition, To Love Two Countries: Ireland's Greatest Generation in America, celebrates and - in a very real way - memorializes, the lives of elderly Irish immigrants who traveled here in the first half of the 20th century, often never to return to their former homeland.

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Nster.com