Reconstructions. Steafán Hanvey
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much of the manuscript.
Finally, thanks to Conor Graham at Merrion Press for seeing the potential in the book from early on, and for offering me the launching pad for my poems.
Foreword Billy O’Callaghan
Author of The Dead House, and The Things We Lose, the Things We Leave Behind and Other Stories.
Steafán Hanvey must rank as one of Ireland’s best-kept secrets – poet, film-maker and singer-songwriter of the first order, a striking and unique talent ripe with the experience of a hundred lives lived and a thousand more observed. For the past several years, he has toured the world with a highly acclaimed multimedia performance incorporating songs, spoken word and projections from his father’s vast collection.
World-renowned photographer Bobbie Hanvey was the eye that captured forever, in all their unflinching glory, some of Northern Ireland’s most defining moments. Now, set in context by some of Steafán’s most authentic, innovative and keenly honed prose poetry, these images take on even greater resonance. The result is an astonishing and visceral work that strikes clean to the often dark but always shining heart of Northern Ireland during its most troubled decades. It makes for the purest and highest art, a heady combination of words that set the pictures alight and pictures that tell a thousand stories, spanning the entire scale between black and white, infusing the devastation and trauma of their subject matter with the strength, determination, courage and hope that defines, as only the finest art can, a place and its people. Reconstructions is a celebration of life and a validation of two lives’ work.
Introduction
A few years back, my father emailed me a black-and-white photograph of Main Street in Brookeborough, his home village in Co. Fermanagh. I used to spend my Easter holidays and some of my summer holidays down at my Granny Hanvey’s in the same village. She would often mistakenly refer to me as ‘Bobbie’ – my father’s name – to which I passed little heed. I never let on, for I knew, even as a child, that she’d just mixed us up, and to put her right, I thought, would have embarrassed us both no end. So, I just went by ‘Bobbie’ when I was staying with her. To the local kids, I was known as ‘Hansy’s cub’. To complicate matters even further, when I saw photos of my da as a child, I thought they were of me; so much so, that I wouldn’t believe my parents or my granny when they tried to convince me otherwise. This close resemblance made more sense of my granny’s mix-up. To her, having me around, was like having her Bobbie back. It was clear she missed him terribly and that she was very lonely, having become a widow several years earlier. So, I was really company for her in her later years, something I’m glad of when I look back.
Getting back to the photograph of Brookeborough: no sooner had I received it than I had written a poem about my stays with Granny Hanvey. Within twenty minutes, I’d sent it back to my father. I was aware that I had a collection of memories that would have been very similar to his own as a child. Perhaps I was trying to impress upon him our shared experience. Happily, he reacted positively and the idea for this book was born.
Having just one month earlier become a father myself for the first time, I was enjoying a breather from a prolonged period of touring my second album Nuclear Family and its artistic corollary, a multimedia performance called Look Behind You!™ A Father and Son’s Impressions of the Troubles through Photograph and Song, which happily brought my father’s work to new and distant audiences.
Curating, producing and eventually touring Look Behind You!™ had shown me that I had several channels of expression before me. Things were opening up, even if words were still the primary focus. Quite surprised at how easily the memories made their way down the pen and onto the page, I thought it would be an interesting and challenging project to embark upon, so I got writing. Although I had been working with words in one form or another for most of my life, this experiment and process proved to be a different animal altogether – different to anything I had previously tried or produced. I then started to revisit some of my father’s iconic photographs with the intention of producing a poem for each. In the end, the photos were part-inspiration, part-confirmation, in that I reacted to some and wrote new poems, whereas others complemented pieces I’d written at earlier stages of my life.
Growing up in the house anomaly built meant that I was present at the conception of many of these photographs. I witnessed their act of becoming, as it were, and marvelled as they developed a life of their own in chemical trays. I pegged many of them on the drying-line myself and often had a hand in the framing before they took up residency on the walls of our home.
Sometimes, after having been out in the wee hours on the latest adventure, I’d put the photographs on the day’s first buses to their pre-arranged collection point, ready for whatever newspapers happened to be carrying them that day. I watched them take on other lives too – on book covers, inside the books themselves, and on record covers. I witnessed and partook in captions in the making, photographs of me and us all in the taking.
My point is, they were there as much for me growing up as I was for them and now that they’ve found a new virtual home in an archive in Boston Mass., I thought I’d take a torchlight and blow a layer of dust off and say to the world, ‘Look, over here! This is something to see!’ And look they did, and they’re still looking.
We all look at photographs differently; we see new things every time we revisit them, details we may have missed first time around, which I suppose is why we have the phrase ‘one look is worth a thousand words’.
It’s clear who pressed the button. My father has likened the capture itself to a sniper pulling a trigger: ‘You look through the camera the same way a sniper looks through a gun. You press the shutter, he presses the trigger. He hopes to get something. I don’t think there’s much else involved.’ He conceived these photographs and I hope that my words, responses and memories do them and their taker – my fathographer – the justice they deserve. I also hope that in my presentation of each reconstruction that I have afforded the less-fortunate – those who lost their lives, and those who were hurt and are hurting still – their due respect.
This is my first collection of poems.
Steafán Hanvey, 2018
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