As many of you know I’ve been photographing Grahamstown’s Heritage sites over the past year. There are 70 of them so it’s a bit of a challenge to draft a poster for the whole series.
This is the composite image that I have been working on lately. It uses the sepia style that I have been experimenting with and is an overlay of many layers. Church Square is the bottom layer, then I painted in the Rhodes main building next. On top of that comes the towers and turrets of the Observatory Museum. Then, if you look carefully, you can just see the lettering ‘Church’ and ‘1820′ from the front of the Baptist Church. Lastly there’s the man with umbrella in Fingo Village and directly above him is the Monument building in the sky above town.
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.