City Hall is not everybody’s favourite, I know that, but the building and its streetscape is impressive. From the pedestrian crossing in Church Square you get this sweeping view of the clock tower, the Victorian frontage of Birch’s, a glimpse of the ornate towers on Commemoration Church and then onwards down High Street to Makana;s Kop on the skyline. The foundation stone was laid in 1877 and it was completed in 1882. On the ground floor the City Hall originally housed the 15,000 volumes of the Public Library with the Albany museum collection on the first floor.
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.