When I was driving through Nelson County, Kentucky, south of the city of Louisville, where I live, I was looking for an Indian mound I’d been told about by a volunteer at the small history museum in Shepherdsville. He had indicated the location on Google maps—large enough, as he pointed out, to be clearly seen on the satellite image. I drove east on the Clermont Highway toward Bardstown. I had often photographed in that area: the Bernheim Forest, the distilleries, old buildings around Bardstown.
I had a lot on my mind. My mother had been in the hospital for a week. I had contracted shingles, and though I caught the infection quickly, I had a sense of my own health, how frail a body could be. A friend of mine commented on how stress affected our immune systems. It was a warm day in March, spring imminent, the sky mostly clear.
I left the highway and turned north toward the Deatsville Road. It was a highway I’d not been on. Approaching the railroad tracks, I was stunned to see a massive complex of dilapidated buildings and, just beside them, the original Deatsville train station. I parked the car in a bit of gravel beside the station. I saw the moon rising in the east; in my mind, I framed it beside the smokestack beside the tracks.
In the trunk, I had my Sinar 4x5. I set it up, facing the moon and the tower. I tried several lenses, but I could not find a composition to my satisfaction. The image didn’t have the scale I envisioned, and what I saw on the ground glass made little impact on me. I had plenty of afternoon light left, and time enough to find the mound, so I explored a bit more.
The edifices and structures I examined—part of an abandoned distillery I’d not heard of—were behind a chain-link fence, so exploration was out of the question. But two towering silos before me, crowned with what seemed a little guardhouse, soon occupied my attention. I positioned the camera and used movements to effect a straightened perspective. I wanted a sense of the imposing quality of the silos.
The details may not matter so much—I used my 210mm lens, TMAX 100 shot at a speed of 50, a red filter—though they occupied my mind at the time. I had to practice patience; the day was breezy, and a cumulus cloud blocked the sun intermittently, briefly allowing light for a few seconds at a time. I made two exposures (actually three, but the dark slide got caught on the film on the first shot) and packed the camera up, continuing north toward the mound.
I developed the sheets the following morning. I mixed fresh developer—D76, which I use 1:1—and ran the sheets one at a time. I was being cautious because I knew I had a good image. They came out, best I can tell, perfectly, save for the two clouds at the crown of the tower, which I knew I would have to fix with masking. By the afternoon, the film dried, I scanned them and liked what I saw.
By the time I moved into the printing the next day, I knew that I had found in the image an equivalent. I had fussed over the camera, both rear and front standards, to straighten the form to my satisfaction. I wanted its geometry perfectly, to be solid, sheer even. But it took time before I had realized precisely why.
I often photograph towering objects framed by the sky. They are often singular, individual. I began to see in these images a longing for strength, an emblem of confidence, a bearing. I see in this image, however subtly it may appear to a viewer beside myself, a kind of courage. This distillery—even the idea of distillation appeals to me enough to include the word in my title—wears the clothing of fortitude. It resembles to me a figure, of course, its chest lifted, its spine straight, arced toward the heavens.
My photographs teach me, much as my poems and essays do, what it is, exactly, that I am thinking. It teaches me what I believe, in fact. The photograph may even, at times, admonish me. In this case, it’s my conviction that I asked, however silently, for a totem to measure myself against, a model to match. I believe that I found it here, unexpectedly, in the abandoned, ivied steel.