The next picture show

Contemporary music photographers must envy John Minihan. John worked in London during the Swinging Sixties, and could pop unhindered into venues like The Crawdaddy in Richmond and The Marquee to snap shots of The Rolling Stones, Rory Gallagher, The Hollies, Chuck Berry, The Animals, The Yardbirds, The Moody Blues, The Beach Boys and others, not only with apparent total freedom and trust, but as an ally, not a threat.

As Minihan himself explains, “I was as much of a fan of the music then as I was into photography. So bands and the managers trusted me. I was also very useful to them, as I had my shots used in music papers like NME, Melody Maker, Disc and national newspapers such as the Daily Mail and the Evening News, so I was relatively free to do as I liked.”
Dubliner Minihan grew up in Athy, County Kildare, where the local Savoy Cinema and holy pictures of the Blessed Virgin and the Sacred Heart were virtually the only kind of visual entertainment to hand. But all that was to change when, aged 11, his family moved to London. “I worked as an office boy on the London Evening News,” he recalls.
“I then became an apprentice darkroom printer on the Daily Mail. I remember having to re-copy photos that came in on the wires of John F Kennedy’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald getting shot himself, and I had to re-copy it to make it suitable for transmitting on, to our other papers.”
To make some pocket money he began to pop along to music venues, little knowing that this would be his passport to fame, if not fortune. “At a time when I might only be getting paid 30 shillings a week, if a music paper used a shot of mine with, say, The Beach Boys, I’d get about £2 for that,” he says. “But if they used only Brian Wilson from it in a later issue, I’d get another fee. It was a great time to be alive, and especially to be in London when there was that great explosion of music. Even today, that’s the music I still listen to and it sounds as great as ever.”
In time, Minihan became one of Ireland’s most celebrated photographers, revered not only for his music shots but also for his literary portraits and landscapes. His friendship with Samuel Beckett produced some of the most stunning black-and-white photographs of the writer. “I’ve always wanted to photograph people I know something about, so that I can shoot them in comfortable surroundings in a way that tells you something about them,” he says.
It prompts the enquiry as to whether he had a particular penchant for b/w shots? “Well, first of all,” he explains, “in the early days only black and white shots were used. But you couldn’t shoot Beckett in anything but black and white. Black and white is the classical music of my world. It has a narrative to it that colour doesn’t. There’s a truth you can find in a black and white shot that you won’t find in colour. They make people look more glamorous than they are. You need black and white for blues music too.”
His forthcoming photographic exhibition will span four decades of his work, and will include never before published photographs of The Who, taken in 1964 at the Marquee in London. “I took so much stuff in those days, and had no real sense of it being of any lasting value. The Who shots I just never used. I was looking at a shot the other day, and it was quite remarkable. It had Daltrey and Townshend on one side, both still alive, and on the other side Moon and Entwistle, both now gone. But those shots take me straight back to a truly wonderful time I was really lucky to have lived through.”
Because of his contacts with The Animals, when their former member Chas Chandler brought over to London an American guy he was going to manage, Minihan got the first shots ever taken of him in England. The guy? None other than Jimi Hendrix, another featured artist at the exhibition, alongside Andy Warhol, William Burroughs, Chuck Berry, The Clancy Brothers, David Hockney, Al Pacino, Keith Richard, Ray Charles, Seamus Heaney and Louis LeBrocquy.
Minihan’s fondness for those explosive times and the people he met shines through. “I’m a real fan of the blues, and people like Van Morrison. I took the shot for the cover of Van’s latest album Pay The Devil. He was a huge influence even back in the 60s, not just because he was another Irishman in London, but his music was so special and still is.”

The Portraits Of The Artists photographic exhibition by John Minihan takes place at the Catherine Hammond Gallery in Glengarriff, West Cork, 28 June – 18 July 2007.