The great
French photographer Robert Doisneau once wrote:
“If you make
pictures, don’t talk about it, don’t write about it, don’t analyse yourself,
don’t answer any questions. “
Unfortunately
it seems that in the visual arts world today you can’t get anywhere without
analysing yourself, without devising an ideology, without having an overarching
conceptual framework to which you stretch your art to fit. John Minihan does
none of these things and I believe suffers because of it. I believe in his work you will find much that
suggests he is the closest the Irish get to having an Andre Kertesz or a Cartier Bresson. Particularly in his
photographs of his home town of Athy. They have an elegiac quality that all of
the finest photographs have. It’s no coincidence that Roland Barthes decided to
combine an elegy for his mother with a study of photography in his book Camera
Lucida. There is something about a photograph that tricks the brain, even a
black & white photograph, into believing that you are the primary observer
of its subject. To look at a painting is to know that we are observing at a
remove the primary observation of the artist, but in viewing a photograph we can
believe we are the primary observer – often ignoring the fact that the
photograph is not merely taken but made, composed with a sensitivity for
framing, angle, light, contrast, grain.
But because
it is the recording of a passing moment a photograph is an elegy and as time passes all the more, a photograph becomes
not just an elegy for a lost past moment but for a past epoch or age. It is
more obviously an elegy when the photograph is of a person who has died but it
can also be an elegy for a person still living. Nabokov said that beauty is
always tragic because beauty must always die. One only has to look at Minihan’s
portrait of Mickey Rourke here to understand that philosophy. Like Kertesz
Minihan has not only elegised the little people – the children of another age
in Athy who have yet to come into any power and the impoverished old there who could never have any power– but he has
also devoted a great deal of his work to celebrity– not just to obvious celebrities such as
Hollywood actors, soon-to-be royal princesses and Parisian couturiers but
especially writers, writers both of iconic majesty such as Beckett and Auden
but writers of little fame and great poverty also such as Padraic Fiacc and
Michael Hartnett. Many of these images have the status of legend such as the portraits
of Beckett here walking away from the viewer and another of him revealing every
hard won facial crevice sitting outside a Paris Cafe. His portraits o f the
poet Michael Hartnett and Robert O’Donoghue are, in particular, masterly.
This exhibition is a mere taster of Minihan and I would urge anyone in this country who cares for art photography to get to view two of Minihan’s books, Shadows from the Pale which is his portrait of Athy and An Unweaving of Rainbows – his portraits of Irish writers, both are out of print if you can’t get them through your library you can pick up a copy of the former on Amazon for about €300 I got mine for £22 from Waterstones when it forst came out. The latter book can still be picked up at a steal for under a tenner.
This exhibition is a mere taster of Minihan and I would urge anyone in this country who cares for art photography to get to view two of Minihan’s books, Shadows from the Pale which is his portrait of Athy and An Unweaving of Rainbows – his portraits of Irish writers, both are out of print if you can’t get them through your library you can pick up a copy of the former on Amazon for about €300 I got mine for £22 from Waterstones when it forst came out. The latter book can still be picked up at a steal for under a tenner.
Posts
