This photo of the Cock House is another of my antique-styled pictures of Grahamstown’s heritage sites. Although the sepia style and bleached look of the photo is old fashioned the content of the heritage series always has something contemporary. In this case it’s Makana Revive fixing the potholes in the four way junction outside the Cock House. The municipality has been unable to repair the town’s roads and so local initiatives and civil society have increasingly come together to improve the condition of our town.
This picture is one of eight in this style that I will have in my photo exhibition at #NAF19.
’Reflections’ is at the Johan Carinus Art Centre for the duration of the Arts Festival from June 27 to July 7.
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.