Clown Exposure: Forever Ever

In this week's Clown Exposure, Slipknot percussionist Shawn Crahan provides Noisecreep with a photo of a statue that's both ancient and timeless. In addition to capturing astonishing detail with the shot, Crahan rendered the background jet black, drawing the focus to the striking contrasts between light and dark. The eye is first drawn to the statue's stone white hair, left arm and left hip. Then the natural flow of the photo takes the viewer to the darkened face, with its closed eyes and tight lips. The way the head looks down makes the statue appear almost sad. And her exposed right breast gives her a strong femininity, but at the same time makes her appear somewhat vulnerable. At least that's our take on it. Now here's Clown's interpretation.

Clown: At this point in my career I'm looking for parallel themes of my own creation so I shoot statues a lot. I love marble statues, stone statues and these kind of things just because of the strength of them and the curve. A good statue almost defines the youth in the aspect that it's so solid and hard and strong. And when I shoot this kind of stuff I'm always finding myself with a new subject and I'm trying to better it from the last one. So if you look at it compared to the last one you can notice the evolution of it.

This was done in Nashville, Tennessee and I just had woken up that morning and went, "Are there any confederate or crazy old, old, old-school graveyards around here where I could really get in and get some depth and age and Civil War history. I got led to this and it ended up being one of those moments I really love.

It's very sexual and beautiful, but it's very old, and you can tell how old it is because there are some things that are really solid on there but then there are other things that have been weathered by decades and decades of time. To me, cameras are time machines and if you can experiment with capturing time the right way, you wind up with something special.