The Winged Figure of Peace stands at the top of Bathurst Street – right opposite the Commemoration Church. She rises above a soldier fallen during the Anglo-Boer War. Stanley Nicholson Babb was the sculptor.
She’s usually photographed from lower down High Street – on her other side – so she presents an imposing silhouette with the Church Square and Cathedral beyond. I thought it would be interesting to see how she looked from Church Square itself with Tantyi and Makana’s Kop on the skyline. The difficulty in getting the shot is that you are forced to stand amongst the traffic to get it. Especially tricky if you decide that the light’s just right on a Friday afternoon payday at the month end. In any case I was pleased with how this came out. The lighting was appropriately sombre for the subject and I think it shows off the sculpture nicely.
RODDY FOX
Roddy is a self taught photographer whose first camera, a Zeiss Ikon, was bought in 1974 from a second hand dealer in Glasgow. Through the forty years since then, he's taken landscape photographs with Pentax, Olympus and FujiFilm systems for his teaching and research as a geography academic at Kenyatta and Rhodes Universities. He has always been inspired by great nature and landscape photographers such as Nick Brandt, Beth Moon, Obie Oberholzer and Hans Strand. Since taking early retirement he has been able to pursue his passion for photography, published a photobook ’Symmetry in Nature’ and held three solo exhibitions at the National Arts Festival, Grahamstown, South Africa.
His landscape photography is about light: often at low angles, of forests, mist and clouds, the night sky and lightning. He prints on different media depending on the affects he wants to produce: brushed aluminium for reflecting angled light; Hahnemühle German Etching paper for soft diffusion; Ilford Metallic Gloss for vibrant night pictures.
His conceptual photography uses mirroring and merging of layers to explore patterns, motifs and the feminine in nature.