Makana Revive at work outside the Cock House

The Cock House is one of Grahamstown’s iconic buildings so I just had to include it with my other Heritage pictures. The several thousand potholes that pock mark the streets of town are fast becoming iconic too and since the Council don’t appear to be doing a great deal about them civic organisations have taken the lead. On the day I went to take this picture Makana Revive had set up traffic barriers in the junction outside the Cock House and they were busy filling in the nest of holes. It was a grey day so I was pleased to get a lot of red into the picture from the house itself and the street signs. So this picture tells a story – and let’s hope that once the Council goes (it has been dissolved by Court Order) then the streets of the town can be repaired sustainably.

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.