Bobbie Hanvey was born on October 31, 1945 in Brookeborough, County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland to Johnny and Mary (Donnelly) Hanvey. Johnny was from Doran's Rock, near Saintfield in County Down, and Mary was from Colebrooke Cross in Fermanagh. Johnny was a lumberjack in rural Ireland in the 1940s and 1950s who took photographs of both the men and machines at work. Johnny bought Bobbie a tape recorder as a child, and Bobbie would use his father's camera to photograph the neighbors and record their songs and ceilis (social gathering with singing and music).

After working in textile factories and singing in a folk club in England during the summer of 1965, Bobbie returned to Northern Ireland and took a job as a student psychiatric nurse at the Downshire Hospital in Downpatrick. Though he had no nursing experience, the hospital offered music therapy and Bobbie was hired based on his ability to play guitar. The nurses also filmed patients as a way to entertain them and Bobbie began helping them while also taking still photographs of the patients singing traditional songs. Nurses at the hospital initially taught him how to develop and print photographs and he strengthened that knowledge by reading books and spending a great deal of time in the darkroom. By the early 1970s, though he had qualified and worked as a psychiatric nurse, Hanvey left the Downshire to work full time as a professional photographer, shooting weddings, babies, current events, and music album covers.

As a photographer, writer, and musician, Hanvey records people and life in Northern Ireland. His long-running weekly Downtown Radio program “The Ramblin' Man,” which began in the late 1970s, interviews guests from across the cultural spectrum from politicians to artists. His photographic work has been used by news services, published in two volumes, Merely Players (1999) and Last Days of the RUC-First Days of the PSNI (2005), and featured in The Irish Century (published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1998). He is also the author of the prose work, The Mental, based on his experience as a psychiatric nurse. In the mid-1980s Hanvey garnered three consecutive Northern Ireland Provincial Press Photographer of the Year Awards and two Northern Ireland overall “Best People Picture” awards. He continues to work as a photographer for his own business and personal interests.

He lives in Downpatrick and has three children, Steafán, Ciarán, and Sarah Ann.

Source:

Dukehart, Coburn. Like Father, Like Son: Creating Art In A Time Of Troubles, NPR online, June 14, 2013. Accessed on July 12, 2021. https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2013/06/14/191059207/like-father-like-son-creating-art-in-a-time-of-troubles

Hanvey, Bobbie, and Turner, Brian S. Merely Players: Portraits from Northern Ireland, Colourpoint Books, 1999.