and their two children, Lumi and Luca.
Steafán Hanvey 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, Nuclear Family. When I first learned about Steafán and Bobbie Hanvey, I knew their story was something special. One that deserved to be told through the very art that it had inspired.
–NPR
Late Developer
My first lessons in light
were under the cover
of darkness.
From bardic lamp-lit
country roads
to safelight enclosed,
the darkroom in Irish Street
was like a look-out post,
the milk crate –
a bosun-chair,
allowing me,
surgeon’s mate,
a child’s-eye view
of jackdaws
squatting murderously
on derelict chimneypots,
and of-a-world,
none too fair
or familiar.
Like a surgeon-cum-midwife
with suspect-devices,
you took your work
under the knife
in here,
attempting sutures
of out there.
Eager to please,
I’d scan our theatre
through your fag-fug
and mouth a silent
Check! for each tool laid down,
each procedure enacted:
Stop-bath, tongs, developer,
fixer, enlarger, timer,
thermometer, trays, squeegee – Check!
With your inverted-subverted images,
you conjured the lifeless,
summoning visions,
bent on renewal.
As the news was breaking
out there,
the water broke in here,
like amniotic fluid
gushing around the sink,
making it difficult
to think.
Like a tilt-shifted
Niagara Falls,
it swished, sputtered,
ebbed and flowed.
You’d let me tip away
at the developing-tray
as we’d impatiently watch
the edges burn grey,
one sorrowful flowering
after another,
secrets wrung from
tragedy, unwriting white,
developing and fixing the night.
Surfacing through
the fog-salt,
negatively positive
stills are born,
light-insensitive,
so peaceful and mute,
rendered, not sundered,
after the storm.
As you pull on your fag
the end flits freely,
firefly-like.
My da:
a memory-making middleman,
assessor from The Ministry of Lost Causes,
taking sides under cover of darkness,
an aftermathematician,
reducing a formula,
a variable bidder
with oblivion,
a framer and custodian
of unsolicited closures.
You print contact-sheets
that electrify the eye;
You deliver stills that are
memorial-machines
which incubate
as the world outside
contemplates.
When I spy with my child’s eye,
I’m conspiring in
your world of creation.
You’re there with the look of
a hunted light-gatherer.
Your camera obscura
captures history in utero
and performs a routine-delivery.
Yours is a mid-wife’s elation,
quiet and jaded,
clutching
