Clown Exposure: Before the Art

When Slipknot percussionist Shawn Crahan (aka Clown) isn't working with his bandmates or playing drums with his side project Dirty Little Rabbits, chances are he's either hanging out with his family or taking strange and surreal pictures of the world around him as he'd like to see it – an art he's been cultivating for the past 10 years.

When he first started out, his shots were intriguing and unsettling, but not quite ready for prime time. But over the years he has honed his skills and developed his own style, one that relies largely on his obsessions with death, sex and dreams.

He started out by taking thousands of photos with his Mamiya medium format camera and a Polaroid back, and manipulating and distorted those shots to present alternate, often frightening perspectives of reality. And while he still enjoys destroying the integrity of photos by altering the settings on his cameras, using a scanner or tweaking the settings on Photoshop, these days he often strives to capture the nightmarish qualities of true images instead of making regular images appear nightmarish.

More importantly, he's ready to share those images with Noisecreep in a weekly guest blog called 'Clown Exposure.' His first entry, 'Before the Art' is a stark black and white photo, which, at first glance, resembles an ancient Mayan stone carving of a demon or a painful Medieval torture device. As Crahan likes to say, "If you see something, it's probably there." In a way, the picture is an instrument of torture and does represent a demon, but as Crahan explains below, it's a creation of Slipknot's own device.

"I try to spend as much time as I can every record cycle studying what we do, what we are, what we're made of what we make to be.

This is Corey's newest mask, which he designed for himself. I really like the transformation this mask has gone through because it used to have a top, which was sewn on. I don't know what the story is behind it, but he took the top off and left these stitches. And when it's on, I always comment how much I like the stitches. I just feel like more of the artist is breathing out through what we are. It's almost like we just become the masks. Corey becomes this person.

So, this particular day I was really feeling it. I put it down on a black carpet and I used an 85mm lens that really lets you get in there. I really like this photo because it's moving and it reminds me of a fish. It's something that isn't what it is. And if you showed this to the outside world who didn't know anything about what we do or who we are, they might have all kinds of other explanations of what this is. And they might not even put it together that it's a mask because it's laid out horizontally.

To me, this particular experiment is all about looking at something differently than what it is, especially in a shape other than what it's made to be. And that's why I like it so much. There's so many linear ideas. The circle in the middle represents the middle of this picture, but really it's for his ear. And it coincides excellently with his eye, and the eye goes down to the mouth. It's just something a little bit stranger than the obvious. Yes, it's obvious to us and most that know us, but maybe not so obvious for everyone else."