Bobbie Hanvey shares the best of his photographic archive
Sarah Sharvin and Peg Hynds bringing home firewood outside Downpatrick
VETERAN photographer Bobbie Hanvey has snapped the great and good, the obscure and the strange, the old and the young, poets and prelates, chimney sweeps and Orangemen and women walking with firewood in their arms.
A new exhibition of his work, entitled About Faces, is now on show at the Down Arts Centre, 78 pictures from his substantial archive ranged about the room in all their glory.
There is the filmmaker and musician David Hammond looking sanguine in peaked cap; playwright Brian Friel tugging at his shirt collar for better breathing room; poet Michael Longley looking wry and stately and knowing; an Orangeman’s back as he sits in a field post-parade; a woman named Mina Wales with a gap-toothed, wide smile.
There are images of political relevance here too: photographs of loyalists and republicans; moments of Ulster’s conflict captured forever in black and white.
So legendary is Hanvey in his skill with a camera that an American university has acquired 75, 000 of his negatives - documenting the people, places and events that have shaped Northern Ireland over the past 40 tumultuous years - to store in an archive alongside the papers of WB Yeats and the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Before he became a photographer, Fermanagh-born Hanvey worked as a staff nurse in the Downshire psychiatric hospital, Downpatrick (he wrote about this period of his life in a book called The Mental in the mid-90s).
He worked as a newspaper photographer first, but it was as an independent that he found his inimitable style and strength.
A colourful man, Hanvey has fronted a weekly radio programme, The Ramblin’ Man, on Downtown Radio for the past 34 years, interviewing everyone from the late UVF leader Gusty Spence to IRA veteran Joe Cahill and former chief constable Sir Hugh Orde.
Whether it be agreeing to pose for him or have a chat with him live on air, no one seems to turn him down. That takes a rare quality indeed.
n About Faces by Bobbie Hanvey runs at the Down Arts Centre, Downpatrick until February 27. For more information visit www.downartscentre.com.
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Friday 25 May 2012
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