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144Belle Fontaine CemeteryPosey Co. (346-09)For information about John Bower and his work, please visit www.studioindiana.com3I have no idea how many cemeteries we actually visited, but we found something to photograph in nearly 200 of them. All in all, we discovered over 600 statues (and that doesn%u2019t include the many small eroded lambs and doves, or newer concrete statues), and I took about 3,000 photographs of them. I ended up with so many images that it was difficult to choose which ones to include on these pages. Most of what I photographed are threedimensional statues, but I also captured some outstanding two-dimensional bas-reliefs. Based on what we saw, I%u2019d say that there are probably cemetery statues in every single one of Indiana%u2019s 92 counties. My camera is a Mamiya 645 medium-format model and I almost always use a tripod. For many of the shots herein, I used a filter (red, orange, or yellow) to darken the blue sky. For film, I tend to use Ilford%u2019s FP4+, which I process in my own darkroom. Because a number of the statues we encountered were up in the air, on top of a pedestal, I rigged a special mount for my camera so I could clamp it to the top of an 8%u2019 step ladder, which I used as an extra-tall tripod. Overall, this project took approximately a year to complete, and we put over 10,000 miles on our Toyota RAV4 (which is equipped with a roof rack for the ladder).When all the photography and darkroom work was completed, Lynn took over the project to do the design and layout for this book. This is one of her specialties, and it amazes me how fast she can transform a stack of images into pages as coherent and beautiful as these. So, in closing, I%u2019d like to say %u201cThanks, Honey.%u201d