His first shoot, in May, was typical of scenes that would play out over the course of the project at the complex, which sits in Roxana just north of the boundary with South Roxana.

“I was setting up for a shoot on a long, gravel parking lot along Madison Street in South Roxana,” Atwood said. “There was no sign on the lot; it looked like a public parking area.”

Within minutes, a police car pulled up.

“The officer told me, ‘You can’t do that here,’ ” Atwood said.

It turned out that the parking lot was private property, owned by the refinery. Atwood would come to learn that the refinery owns just about all the property that abuts the behemoth plant that is not a city street or sidewalk.

Atwood said he was careful from then on to shoot only from public streets and sidewalks.

But the confrontations continued.

At one point, he said, a South Roxana officer told him that the refinery had the power under the Patriot Act to confiscate his camera. He said other officers had threatened to arrest him in the name of special Homeland Security laws, and that plant guards, citing the terrorist attacks of 9/11, have threatened to have his name placed on a national list as a security risk.