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Gianluigi di Napoli presents an anthology of images dedicated to David Larible, for years defined by the press as "the world’s greatest clown", he is perhaps the only living comedian who can perform in the intimacy of a theatre as well as for important audiences like Madison Square Gardens.
The clown is regarded as the circus’ core, an emblematic and alien character whose task is to guide the audience back to its incredulous naivety of dreams, and of the mysteroius beings living in the big top. [editor summary]

"So view, and get over it." And so begins the lighthearted attempt of Scary Clowns to relieve coulrophobes of their fear of "grotesquely made-up men wearing overly large trousers, huge shoes, and a red nose."

This fear may seem as amusing as the characters that inspire it, but numerous support groups and hundreds of Web sites are dedicated to coulrophobia. Horror movies featuring killer clowns, as well as notorious clown/serial killer John Wayne Gacy, have only fed the fear.

Over 80 full-color photographs-from the surreal to the grotesque-populate Scary Clowns, bringing readers face to face with their worst nightmares. A pop-up clown in the middle of the book forces the reader to confront his darkest fear in 3-D. It is all done in the name of good, clean fun, of course.

Why are seemingly innocuous clowns so horrifying to so many people? The introduction in Scary Clowns attempts to demystify the strange phobia.

By nature silent, a clown makes no noise or complaint as he falls over, throws things, plays with knives, walks on high wires, tumbles, turns, and collapses. Maybe it's the silence that makes him so scary.

The modalities of appearance mark Roni Horn's series of 36 head shots of a clown. Originally seen in her Clowd and Cloun installation, a series of alternating images on the two motifs of the cloud and the clown, Horn's stunning photographs of the inevitable clown (he always looks the same) disintegrate the very consistency that makes a clown recognizable as a clown. The clown is a constant, a symbolic form whose identity is rooted in a conventionally defined appearance (red bulbous nose, a shock of bright frizzy hair, white pancake skin, an ear-to-ear grin), one that occludes the specifics of the persona--the player--who temporarily assumes that guise. Cabinet of repeats 36 times the dissolution of the clown's appearance and thus, perhaps, the defining features of the clown itself. [editor summary]