BOBBIE Hanvey is expecting to die between 2018 and 2020. There is no medical reason for his belief; he is not ill and hasn’t visited a doctor in years. He is physically fit for a man of 66 with a challenging mind and apart from the occasional half pint of Guinness doesn’t touch alcohol. His only vice, although he doesn’t see it as such, is cigarettes which he puffs with alarming regularity.
Hanvey’s flirtation with his own mortality it based on nothing more than the fact that many of his ancestors passed on between 72 and 74 so he quite expects to maintain the family tradition.
With the clock now ticking, Hanvey has decided to devote his remaining years to his over riding passion — photography, particularly social photography. He is intending to redouble the chronicling work which has been the subject of his weekly page in the Down Recorder, the recording of life in his adopted home of Downpatrick and the wider area of Lecale.
He has been back on the streets of Downpatrick in recent weeks photographing local people going about their business. The results have been predictably engaging, hilarious, unusual and captivating.
Almost since he first arrived in the town from Fermanagh as a young trainee mental health nurse at the Downshire Hospital in the 1960s, Hanvey has been taking photographs. People, places, events and incidents have all been photographed by Hanvey who has amassed hundreds of thousands of mainly black and white negatives.
Even when he branched into broadcasting with his Rambling Man show on Downtown Radio, which is still listened to in great numbers every week, Hanvey continued to photograph. When he travelled throughout Northern Ireland interviewing interesting people he always took his camera
As his reputation as an innovative and fair photographer grew so did the stature of his subjects. The great musicians, playwrights, poets and artists of Ireland have all been Bobbie’s subjects, many of them since before they were famous. Who can forget the photograph of Seamus Heaney wearing his father’s battered hat in an Irish peat bog?
Businessmen and clergymen rubbed shoulders with politicians, policemen, paramilitaries and the ordinary man on the street in Hanvey’s rapidly growing photographic collection.
And still he continued photographing.
He staged several hugely successful exhibitions in Down County Museum and Down Arts Centre along with two well received photograph books, Merely Players and Last Days of the RUC, First Days of the PSNI.
For Hanvey, the joy of photography has always been in persuading a subject to pose for him and then getting the best out of the session. Once the photograph was taken and filed away Hanvey generally didn’t bother too much about his collection which was taking up increasing space in a spare room.
It was a burst pipe several years ago which suddenly brought home to Hanvey just how many negatives he had. He was forced to clear out the spare room to allow a plumber in and, with boxes and files now cluttering his living room, he realised the volume of negatives.
Downpatrick poet and author, Damien Smyth, who is also a senior official within the Arts Council, impressed upon Bobbie the unique value of the photographs in Northern Ireland’s social history.
Boston College also recognised the importance of Hanvey’s photographs and opened the Bobbie Hanvey Archive and is the process of digitising tens of thousands of Hanvey’s enormous collection.
It was also important to bring the collection to the public which resulted in the weekly offering in the Down Recorder, an initiative which has not dulled in popularity.
Many people in Downpatrick have already been photographed by Hanvey in this latest project and many more can expect to be asked in coming months and years. There will be lot of mirth, there always is with Hanvey, but there is a serious side to all this. Those who agree to be photographed will be taking part in a unique project which is forming a visual social history of one of Northern Ireland’s major towns.
So if you’re approached in the coming months there’s only one answer— say ‘yes’ to Hanvey.