Hiding behind the wall of the Albany Museum is the bell that used to sit on top of the Drostdy Arch. I don’t know when it was taken off the top of the Arch but you can see it on some of the photos from the early twentieth century. The bell lies beside the water tank that was Grahamstown’s original water reservoir. Two furrows (now gone) led out from the tank and ran down the sides of High Street to irrigate the plots behind the buildings. You can see something very similar to this day in Nieu Bethesda and Graaff-Reinet. There used to be a hand cranked water pump but that’s also been removed. Behind the tank in my picture is the Drostdy Arch itself making this is a very historic corner of colonial Grahamstown.
The photo was taken at night during November’s full moon in ‘blue hour’ – just after sunset when you can get lovely rich blue colours in the sky.
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.