The Drostdy Arch by Moonlight
Grahamstown 1820-2020: A Heritage Photobook is my personal selection of Grahamstown’s Heritage Sites and prominent landmarks. I took the pictures, during 2018 and 2019, so as to be able to commemorate the bicentenary of the 1820 Settlers and decided to make a small photobook as a memento. Some of the pictures were taken by moonlight – like the front cover which shows the full moon behind the light hanging from the Drostdy Arch. Visit the photobook’s website and you will see that many of the landmarks have also been captured in a sepia style and there are street scenes that show the character of the town as it is today. The book costs R175 and has 43 colour pictures and three maps in a softcover landscape format at A5 size (14.8 x 21 cms). You can order a copy either directly through the website, or by contacting me (email roddyfox@mac.com; phone 0722582134). Postage and packaging for courier delivery throughout South Africa is an additional R150. Delivery in Grahamstown is free!

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.