Clown Exposure: Left For Dead

Our first reaction when we saw Shawn Crahan's new photo for Clown Exposure, 'Left For Dead,' was, "Holy crap, is that Laura Palmer?"

The shot – which depicts a blond woman sprawled out face down behind a tree in a forest – is eerie and macabre, reminding us of David Lynch's surreal TV show 'Twin Peaks.' In the first episode of that show, a lumberjack in Washington State finds the body of a dead blond girl, Laura Palmer, and for the rest of the series, local cops work with an FBI agent to uncover the sinister secrets of the seemingly sleepy town. In 'Twin Peaks,' nothing is as it seems, and behind every silver lining is a dark undercurrent. The same can be said for much of Clown's photography.

The power of 'Left For Dead' lies as much in the jagged twigs and brown, foliage-free coloration of the forest as it does in the corpse. The girl lay almost parallel to the branch along the bottom of the picture; with a little imagination, it almost appears like she's floating. And neither the tree trunk, which takes up half the frame, nor the body itself, are in razor-sharp focus, enhancing the nightmarish beauty of the image.

"This is an exploration in creating what is and what isn't," Clown says of his creation. "I'm not a sports photographer. I'm not an action photographer. I'm at the point in my career now when I'm really designing the concepts, and the question for me is, 'Can I create something that is believable?'

"I'm always exploring death in whatever way I possibly can, and for something like this I'm at a point in my life where I'm coming up with things that I want people to believe in, whether it's in a positive or negative way. I need them to almost be haunted by my creation, in the fact that maybe they're seeing something different than I'm creating. But at least they're seeing it because I created it."