Clown Exposure: Left for Use

For last week's 'Clown Exposure,' experimental photographer Shawn Crahan sent us a grisly shot called 'Left for Dead,' which featured a staged female corpse lying in the woods. This week, Crahan uses similar themes in 'Left for Use,' but with far different results.

The photo, also shot in the woods, depicts an unclothed wooden male doll lying over a tree branch, and while it has an element of menace to it, it's equally whimsical. Since the doll's legs aren't in the shot, it's unclear whether he's lying down or bending over (draw your own conclusions).

As with 'Left for Dead,' it's Crahan's use of depth of field that makes the photo especially interesting. In this case, the foreground -- which features the doll and branch -- is in perfect focus and the forest behind is blurred and unsettling. For Crahan, part of the glory in the photo lays in finally finding a use for the wooden doll.

"I've had this thing for six years waiting and waiting," he tells Noisecreep. "If you go into my storage area, I have so much stuff that's junk to most, but to me they're all props. And they're things I'm going to get to later. I finally got to this because the time was right.

"The picture is all about the color of the wood. It's wintertime and things aren't coming to life, and everything's see-through. There's a little bit of color, but not much. I'm down there in the forest that's probably 300 feet from a river that floods all the time and comes into here, so there's all kinds of debris.

"For me, this was a little bit of a concept of things washed, and when the water washes away, it leaves things within this structure. There's hundreds of beer cans or plastic plant pots or tires or weird s--t. My boy was walking through here and he found a laptop filled with mud. Who walks through the woods and finds a laptop? But you're never going

to stumble across something weird like this.

"There's a lot of questions that put the point of interest here. I'm posing some serious sordid innuendos. I'm not gonna say what kind they are. I'll let your brain roll around. But as much as this has a little humor to it, there's also some serious undertones as well. And again, it's about trying to make things believable to where when you shut it, you gotta come back in your own mind and ask yourself, "What was that all about?"