For 35 years Irish photographer John Minihan revisited and recorded scenes from his hometown of Athy in Co. Kildare, Ireland. An exhibit of his original photographic silver prints from Athy has been displayed from June 3 to July 15 at the Artspace Gallery on the second floor of Terrence Murphy Hall, 1000 LaSalle Ave., Minneapolis.

Terrence Murphy Hall is part of the University of St. Thomas' downtown Minneapolis campus; its Artspace Gallery is open from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. weekdays. The exhibit is free and open to the public. The 35-print exhibit was curated by St. Thomas photographer Mark E. Jensen. It was presented in connection with the annual meeting of the American Conference for Irish Studies at St. Thomas held June 4-7 and is sponsored by the university's Center for Irish Studies.

Minihan's silver prints depict scenes from the life of the town where he grew up. There are children at play, the necessities of life, the gravedigger, scenes of frustration at the pub, and the wake of Katy Tyrrell, which was photographed over three days and two nights.

"Many of the people he captures," Jensen said, "he has known for years. Athy is an ordinary Irish town that is feeling the incursions of industry, comparative wealth and modernity. Yet, while these prints present a particular world, they also present ongoing timelessness."

Jensen, who traveled to Ireland last year to select prints for the exhibit, said Minihan "gives us a warm, though unsentimental, knowledge of small-town Irish life, which most likely is a vanishing way of life. Yet the faces, especially the faces of the children and the elders, seem to show us the same innate survivability."

Many of the prints in the exhibit appear in Minihan's 1996 book, Shadows from the Pale: Portrait of an Irish Town. His work also appears in the 1998 An Unweaving of Rainbows: Images of Irish Writers with Derek Mahon, in the 1996 Samuel Beckett: Photographs with Aidan Higgins, and in the 1981 Londoners with Richard Bourne.

Minihan had been a staff photographer for 28 years on the London Evening Standard. He resides with his family and works out of his home in Ballydehob, in Co. Cork. Minihan currently is creating photographs for a book on Samuel Beckett that will be published in 2005.