For Barry Donahue, Life On The Cape Was Worth Capturing

ORLEANS – For Meghan Taylor, growing up with Barry Donahue was an ongoing education on the wonders of Cape Cod.

 She and her brother, Brendan, would often tag along with their dad on photo assignments. Sometimes, his work would take them to the top of a fire tower in Wellfleet. On other occasions, they’d visit a whale stranding on the Brewster flats, or watch as their dad took photos of Edward Gorey in a graveyard.

 “That was an interesting one,” said Taylor, a Brewster resident.

 Donahue, a seasoned photojournalist whose work for many years graced the pages of The Cape Codder and more recently The Chronicle, died in September 2025 at the age of 71. But he left behind a versatile body of work that helped tell the story of Cape Cod, more specifically the Lower Cape, over the course of decades.

 Taylor and two of her father’s former colleagues, Merrily Cassidy and Doug Fraser, have put together an exhibit celebrating Donahue’s extensive career documenting the region. “A Life’s Work: Barry Donahue” will kick off with an opening reception Nov. 7 from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the Marion Craine Gallery in the Snow Library, where Donahue’s work will be on display through the month.

 “He was very comfortable with being a photographer,” said Fraser, a longtime reporter for the Cape Cod Times who worked with Donahue at the Cape Codder early on in his career. “He didn’t shirk from taking the shots he needed to take. He also had a real nose for news. He was very much a person who was aware of what’s going on.”

 A native of Worcester, Donahue studied at the New England School of Photography. He later interned at Harvard University and worked at the university’s Fogg Museum before returning home to work for Worcester Magazine, where Taylor said he shot entertainment features. He loved the Boston punk scene, Taylor recalled, and he photographed bands ranging from Black Sabbath and the Rolling Stones to Mission of Burma and Black Flag.

 But Donahue’s heart was on Cape Cod, Taylor said. When he and his wife, Mary, were looking to settle and raise a family, they set roots in Brewster. Today, Taylor lives in the home where she and her brother grew up.

 “His motto was ‘I never come west past the Bass River Bridge,’” recalled Steve Heaslip, who covered assignments alongside Donahue for years during his decades-long career as a photographer for the Times. “That was religion. He was literally the Outer Cape, Ptown to Orleans.”

 When they weren’t tagging along with their dad on assignment, Taylor said she and her brother spent weekends enjoying all the nature the Cape had to offer. More often than not, that included time on Pleasant Bay in their dad’s rowboat.

 “I grew up feeling like he felt lucky to be here,” Taylor said. “That is something that I feel as an adult raising my kids here now, too, so it was definitely a choice he made to move here and raise a family here.”

 The Codder and the Times competed with one another for stories for years. Heaslip, who recently retired as the Times’ chief photographer, said he enjoyed a healthy, playful rivalry with Donahue, who he said could be hard to beat to an assignment.

 “I’d come flying down, I’d run down to the beach,” he recalled. “And Barry would be walking back with his knee-high boots on. He’d just smile and say ‘Yeah, I think there might still be something there to shoot.’”

 Donahue loved the water, Fraser recalled, and that love of the environment and the Cape in general helped him along in his photography. He was a “people person” who easily made contacts, including with those in the fishing industry. Fraser and Donahue paired up together often during their shared time at the Codder, the former recalled. That included a tumultuous trip aboard a New Bedford troller during fierce weather.

 “We were like 300 miles out and seeing 45-foot seas,” Fraser said.

But there was no story that Donahue would shy away from, according to Fraser. Donahue, he said, was someone who was comfortable photographing any subject, and he had a deft ability to make others comfortable as well.

“He was not shy. People knew him, too, He was pretty well known,” he said. “A lot of times when I was with him, it was almost as if people were asking to have their pictures taken, which doesn’t always happen with photographers.”

 “When people were his subjects, I feel like that was his best work,” Taylor said. “He was able to capture people in a way that was not staged or polished. It was real.”

 A celebration of life was held for Donahue last year at Lower Cape TV, which, appropriately enough, formerly housed the Cape Codder pressroom. 

 “There were a couple photographers that I remember when I was a kid working with my dad,” Taylor said. “They were able to say to me now ‘Your dad was my mentor.’ He took that time in his career to try and give back.”

 One of those people was Cassidy, a former Codder staffer and longtime photographer for the Cape Cod Times. She approached Taylor with the idea of hosting an exhibit in her dad’s memory at the Snow Library, where Fraser had his own photography exhibit last year.

 “I said ‘Yeah, it’s doable.’ People at the library were very interested in it,” Fraser said.

 Narrowing down a lifetime’s worth of photographs might sound like a daunting task. Fortunately, Taylor said, her dad did much of the work for her before he passed.

 “I found a box of prints with his handwriting on the cover that said ‘Best (verticals)’ and another box of ‘Best horizontals,’” she said. “I picked through those, because to me, he had gone through everything.”

 Donahue was a “star” of the Codder, Fraser said, noting that his Friday front page photos were something that readers looked forward to every week.

 “There are memorable photos that he took that I still remember when they came out and people were excited,” he said. “Not just people in the newsroom, but the people on the streets. You could see them get the [paper] and immediately go to that photograph and talk about the photograph.”

 In recent years, Donahue stepped back from photography to give more time to being a grandfather to his four grandkids, a job Taylor said he joyfully immersed himself in.

 “He helped us out with childcare,” she said. “He’d pick the kids up off the bus, do the camp picks up, take the kids on the boat, take the kids on nature walks. He was constantly just showing them the Cape that he loved so much. That didn’t change from him going from a dad to a grandfather. That’s what he did for us, too.”

 But photography was never too far away. While he shot less, Donahue took to posting photos from throughout his career on Facebook. There are those of bands, fishermen, mothers playing with their young children and cultural luminaries such as Barbara Walters. For Taylor, taking the time to go through her dad’s photos helped give her an even greater appreciation and understanding of who he was.

 “I think there’s something about your parents that you don’t ever get to know until after they’re gone,” she said. “With my dad, it was just how cool he was. Looking back through all his old work, but also just his appreciation for the Cape, his appreciation for the community, how seriously he took his job and how much he enjoyed his job. All of that is so apparent to me when I go through his work.”

 “He had a really good eye, and when you couple that with a real sense of community, that’s kind of the two things,” Heaslip said of Donahue’s work.

 And for his family, Donahue’s work is a means of keeping his memory and spirit alive.

 “We think about him all the time because he taught us a million different things,” Taylor said. “But to also have his work in our home, it’s nice to be left with those things.”