"I guess I recently thought of explaining Nuclear Family as it's someone trying to make sense of what surrounding chaos sounds like." "I'm investigating the notion that art gives order and logic to chaos," he said.
Steafán is thoughtful, intelligent and reflective about the culture and family that shaped him, as well as how it has influenced and defined his recent album. We had long conversations over Skype, email and from a radio studio about the artist's role in society - especially a modern society defined by conflict. And, bringing the family's creative endeavors full circle, he's now touring America and Canada with his songs and a multimedia presentation called "Look Behind You." Steafán started a rock band in the 1980s, has degrees in American studies and international politics, and has since recorded two albums of personal, soulful music. It was very exciting for a young boy to have been exposed to that kind of life." "Then I would get up the next morning and go to school, and while all my peers had been fast asleep, I'd been out on this adventure. "I would hear my dad getting up and running down the stairs, and sometimes he would say, 'Come on with me here,' and he would be on the way to the aftermath of a fire, or a bomb, or an explosion," he said. And he grew up in a nontraditional household, where his father both held jam sessions with all types of musicians, and also leaped out of bed at night to photograph explosions and bombings. Steafán Hanvey was born in the midst of this melee, a few months after Bloody Sunday in 1972. He also traveled and recorded as a folk musician during the 1970s and '80s. It was there that he taught himself photography and began recording patients as they sung traditional songs. Hanvey quit school at 15, because he "thought life was more exciting," and eventually took a job as a psychiatric nurse at Downshire Hospital in Downpatrick. In 1962, his father gave him his own camera and a microphone, setting the course of Bobbie's life as an award-winning photojournalist and radio interviewer. "He put himself at great risk throughout The Troubles covering individuals and scenes that were oftentimes still in the midst of happenings - bombs, explosions, meetings with both sides - he had an incredible ability to win the confidence of everyone from Ian Paisley to the toughest paramilitiaries."īobbie Hanvey was born in Northern Ireland in 1945, and his father, a lumberjack, was known for going everywhere with a camera. He just has an insatiable appetite for photographing" he said. "Bobbie Hanvey is extraordinarily talented. Thousands of Hanvey's images are now hosted in the Burns Library collection on Flickr. He first met Bobbie in 2000, and was so impressed with his work that he set about acquiring a vast majority of his archive.
Robert O'Neill, Burns librarian at Boston College, to talk more about Bobbie Hanvey, he couldn't have been more excited. And Boston College Libraries recently acquired more than 75,000 of his photographs, which capture the political and cultural life of Northern Ireland since the 1970s. Since 1977, he's recorded over 1,000 interviews for his radio program, The Ramblin' Man, which airs on Downtown Radio.
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When I spoke with him recently, Bobbie Hanvey was quick to say, "I'm not an artist," although the mind-boggling scope of his archive says otherwise. Only recently, however, has his work become available to a wider audience.īringing Bobbie's photographs to America is part of the mission of his son, Steafán Hanvey, a singer/songwriter on tour with a new album, called Nuclear Family, as well as a multimedia presentation showcasing original music alongside his father's work.
But when I dug a little deeper, I realized that he was quite well-known in Northern Ireland, where he has been documenting the culture in photos and audio for more than 35 years. When I first stumbled across the photographs of Bobbie Hanvey, I thought I had found an undiscovered master - perhaps another sort of Vivian Maier. Credit: Video produced by Coburn Dukehart/NPR