It must have been 1986 or 1987 when I first met the photographer, John Minihan.  It wasn’t a chance encounter.  The truth is I practically stalked him.  I had been completely captivated by a portrait of Samuel Beckett that John had taken in Paris and that had recently appeared in one of the UK’s Sunday newspapers.

I was determined to get a print of the picture, but finding John proved surprisingly difficult.  Let’s not forget this was the pre-Google era.  After weeks of persistent research, I was finally directed to the photo desk of the Evening Standard where John was working at the time.  He couldn’t have been more charming and agreed to meet me in a private club popular with journalists and photographers.  He gave me prints of some of the beautiful pictures he had taken of Beckett and told me lovely stories of their many encounters in Paris and London.

John became very well known for his Beckett portraits, but it’s his famous picture of Diana Spencer, taken many years before she became Princess Di, that is his single best-known work.

Many of John’s portraits of Beckett are masterpieces.  Richard Avedon, Jane Bown, and others took wonderful individual pictures of him, but John’s corpus amounts to a sustained and very intimate insight into the great writer.  It was through the Beckett pictures that I first got to see what I think is John Minihan’s best work, the photographs  he has taken over more than 40 years in Athy, the town in County Kildare in which he was raised.  Stunning images from an outstanding photographer who was gracious, generous, and kind whenever we met.