Well it certainly isn’t as good as the iconic view you get of Rhodes from the Drostdy Arch – but this is my academic home from home when I am in Sweden. It’s the entrance I take to Högskolan Väst in Trollhättan. I’ve been connected here since 2004: mostly with Per Assmo. We’ve exchanged over 70 students between Rhodes and HV, but these days I am simply a Professor working part-time (at 10%) on the International Programme in Politics and Economics (IPPE) – which I helped establish way back in 2006. In 2008 the University built a new campus – putting almost all of us under one roof – and that’s what is pictured here.
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.