The Eye Of A Clown

This is the kind of stuff I’m doing a lot of right now. I’m really trying to get into the real details of photography, where the entire experiment is being able to have something in front of you and having the depth of field be in all the circles in the background. So, there’s a tree back there with leaves, but I’m so close to her that all the light between the leaves gets into all that circular stuff.

When it comes to photography, I want to learn it all and be able to do it all. I want to get into just about every realm and study just about everything, so this is an experiment in not having to rely on distortion or layers or manipulating the image to create something disturbing. It’s more about finding the subject, analyzing it, pointing, shooting and being completely happy with it. Boom, there’s the image.

She was taken in Sydney, Australia at a park across from the hotel we stay at. It’s a beautiful, beautiful refuge for these fruit bats. And at dusk every night, they fly off into the ocean and it’s just so surreal. And her she is, and she’s been sitting in the world for a very long time, and I just felt she was beautiful with the moss growing on her, yet the nose is completely free of any of that.

I’ve always had this saying that there’s things in life that have been sentenced to time. I’ll see faces in the sidewalk or in the wall and I’ll say, “Well, this guy must have been bad because he’s going to be here stuck in this brick for 70 years until this road is broken up and then he’ll be out of Purgatory.”

Well, I always wondered, “Why is she there?” So, I have a little flight of fancy and try to put myself into this thing and think, “God, she’s here when it rains and when it’s cold and when the wind blows and when the night sets in.” That’s why I chose her for the photo because I thought she was beautiful and had seen a lot in her lifetime as a structure.