Settler Family by Ivan Mitford-Barberton
This is another one of the sepia-styled prints from The Grahamstown 1820-2020 Heritage Photo book (you can view the book in my website at roddythefox.co.za). The family group isn’t the easiest statue to photograph. It sits on a plinth in a small rectangular space on the ridge beside the carpark outside the Monument. To my eye it’s always looked static and it’s hard to get a pleasing view of the setting it’s in. So I took a very wide-angled lens with me and shot from low-down – from the perspective of the little girl who is looking pensively up at her mother. I chose a grainy feel for the picture to complement the folds and texture of the family’s clothes. The statue dates from 1969 – when the world was a very different place to what it is now.
Next week’s picture will be in full-colour … I will be revisiting the artworks at Egazini.

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.