Bathurst Street Bakkie

There’s quite a few street scenes in my Grahamstown 1820-2020: A Heritage Photobook. This is one of my favourites. Bathurst Street has plenty of heritage sites – notably the Observatory Museum and Baptist Church that have both been renovated recently. I was taking pictures a little further down the road – of 48-50 Bathurst Street – when a police bakkie came rushing past me (too close to me) and I got this nice street scene ‘on the fly’.

The three Bathurst Street heritage sites mentioned here are all found together on one page in the Heritage Photobook. The book’s on sale tomorrow(Saturday 25th) for R175 at the TRADE at Home Virtual Market in Facebook. Just search for the Group TRADE at Home, join it and take a look at all the other goodies that are on offer.

48-50 Bathurst Street, Grahamstown Makhanda Built Heritage

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.