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BIOGRAPHIES

Bobbie Hanvey (The Father)

Bobbie was born in Brookeborough, Co. Fermanagh, in 1945. During the early years of the Troubles in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he worked as a psychiatric nurse. However, he chose to leave the hospital to minister to the wider community by documenting the madness all around him with his camera and microphone. (Given the Troubles, and that George Bernard Shaw claimed that ‘Ireland was the largest open-air lunatic asylum in the World’, this move seemed to make sense!) Bobbie was an ardent campaigner for civil rights in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The Troubles presented Bobbie with an opportunity. By photographing the eerie aftermath of bombsites and shootings, he was able to provide for his family while also becoming known as one of the country’s leading press and portrait photographers. In 1985, 1986 and 1987, he won the Northern Ireland Provincial Press Photographer of the Year Award, and in 1985 and 1987 he also won the Northern Ireland overall award for Best People Picture. These were the only three years that he entered the competitions.

Bobbie has also published two collections of photographs: Merely Players: Portraits from Northern Ireland (1999), which presents portraits taken since the 1970s of poets, playwrights, paramilitaries, priests and politicians. They include Brian Friel, Seamus Heaney, Danny Morrison, David Hammond, Gerry Adams, Sammy Duddy and others.

His most recent photographic book, The Last Days of the R.U.C, First Days of the P.S.N.I (2005), presents the only historic account of the transition of the Royal Ulster Constabulary to the Police Service of Northern Ireland. His book, The Mental (1996), is an account of his early days spent as a psychiatric nurse at The Downshire Hospital in Downpatrick.

Bobbie also hosted a programme on Downtown Radio called The Ramblin’ Man for thirty-six years, where he interviewed over 1,000 people of all shades of persuasion throughout and after the Troubles. Guests on his programme included Ulster Volunteer Force leader Gusty Spence, Provisional Irish Republican Army veteran Joe Cahill, the last four Chief Constables of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and its successor organisation, the Police Service of Northern Ireland, John Hermon, Hugh Annesley, Ronnie Flanagan and Hugh Orde. Other guests included writers Eugene McCabe, Maurice Leitch and J.P. Donleavy, as well as soldiers, sailors and Travellers.

Bobbie’s photographs have appeared in Paris Vogue, The Village Voice, The Melbourne Age, The Irish Times, The Economist and NPR. He wrote a weekly column for The Belfast Newsletter, Ireland’s oldest newspaper. Still active as a photographer, only recently going ‘electric’ (digital!), his unique collection of photographs is to be found in the Burns Library, Boston College, Massachusetts.

An interesting footnote to this fact is that Fr. McElroy, S.J., a Jesuit priest and, like Bobbie, a Brookeborough man, was one of the original founders of Boston College, Mass., back in 1863; quite a fitting coincidence, given that Bobbie’s body of work would find a home in its archives.

Bobbie currently lives in Downpatrick, Co. Down.

‘When I first stumbled across the photographs of

Bobbie Hanvey, I thought I had found an undiscovered

master — perhaps another sort of Vivian Maier.

Arguably, Hanvey’s photographic work rivals that of great

American photographers such as Walker Evans,

Dorothea Lange, and even the spot news artist, Weegee.’

–NPR

‘Bobbie Hanvey is extraordinarily talented.

He just has an insatiable appetite for photographing.’

–Dr Robert O’Neill, Burns librarian at Boston College.