Stirring magical memories of times gone by

Photographer John Minihan recalls his encounters with writer Edna O’Brien, from London in the 1970s to Cork this year

PHOTOGRAPHS have a curious power to stir the imagination — there is nothing quite like them for communicating a sense of the past.

In 1972 the artistic director of the Royal Court Theatre in London, Oscar Lowenstein, asked if I would put on an exhibition of my photographs of Athy, Co Kildare, to coincide with a season of Irish plays by Brendan Behan and Edna O’Brien. The exhibition was a great success, so much so that when Harold Hobson, the theatre critic of the Sunday Times, made his commentary on Brendan Behan’s play, Richard’s Cork Leg, he called the pictures of a child crying by a coffin “poignant, sad and sublime”.