This is it! My last Gathering of the Juggalos post of 2021! But don’t think you will stop seeing juggalos from me anytime soon because my juggalo NFT series will continue and I am sure I will keep bothering you guys about that stuff. Sorry about that. Anyway, day three was my most chill day. I “only” have 160 photos for you guys today. I sort of felt like I had everything I needed and planned to photograph the bands and shoot some more portraits and shoot ICP and then be done with it but my day got sidetracked a little bit.

My first sidetrack was meeting the owner of Legend Valley, the campsite that the festival is on. I was photographing one of the giant dinosaurs that are on the lot and he started talking to me about them. Apparently they are for a EDM fest called Lost Lands that’s happening in a couple weeks. He told me he had 40 small dinos just sitting at his house. They apparently all move and I realize I had actually seen them on Shark Tank. He let me back to a place beyond the security fencing to photograph some of them. It was very cool. I even made a dumb TikTok. 

My next sidetrack was taking some photos with Ouija Macc. As I mentioned before he’s the #2 artist on Psychopathic Records after ICP and he’s managed by a friend of mine so we set up a quick shoot. I went backstage and they were loading huge pallets of Faygo for ICP’s set onto the stage with a forklift and I had an idea. The dude driving the truck looked like Stan Lee if Stan Lee were a biker and loved the idea and lifted Ouija up into the air as high it would go and I grabbed a few shots. He put it down before I was finished but I wasn’t gonna complain and I still got a couple of good ones. 

After that I finally shot a musical act. (I actually took a couple photos of Free Will too.) Lardi B performed and I knew nothing about her except her name sounded pretty funny. Apparently she went viral for doing a WAP parody. She had a set with donuts and candy behind her and as soon as she started playing the crowd started throwing food at her. I honestly couldn’t tell if they were doing it to support her or boo her but either way she took it in stride and it became one of the more memorable performances of the festival. People were throwing entire boxes of snacks at her. I got hit in the neck with a bag of cookies and just caught it, opened it and ate the cookies while shooting her set. It was really fun. There was also a unicorn. 

My next distraction was a pinata. I had shot a juggalo pinata event once before and it was pretty insane. This dude Poncho and his friends go around with the pinata to every campsite just collecting stuff to put in there. So yeah there is candy but there was also a quarter pound of weed and ton of other drugs plus every sort of weird thing you could imagine. I put one of my Driven By Boredom enamel pins in it, so shout out to whoever got that. 

After that a band called Black Raven played and I missed the start of their set so I couldn’t get in the photo pit so instead I shot their mosh pit. People were covered in chalk dust or something and it was a pretty fun scene. I actually went on IG live and filmed it which was fun since I never go on there ever. It just seemed like a good time and people could see what the Gathering was like first hand.

I spent a little while taking portraits during their set but then it started getting dark. I went back to the car to get my flash and realized I didn’t bring it. I made a calculation and decided it was worth trying to go back to the hotel. It took longer than it should have and by the time I got back it was pitch black outside and Big Hoodoo was almost done playing. Fortunately I made it back for Danny Brown.

Danny Brown is a dude I have photographed a ton of times. I actually had a meeting about doing a video for him off his first album but that didn’t ever happen. I still fuck with his music and his performances have always been fun. During his set juggalos seemed to be really vibing with him but after I left the photo pit something must have happened because he started talking shit to the crowd and kinda walked off stage at some point. I have no idea what happened and he didn’t mention it on his social media but he just threw his mic in to the crowd and walked off. Real bummer. 

Finally the festival ended with ICP and I have photographed ICP a million times now including 2 days earlier so I don’t really have anything to say about their set but I am gonna talk gentle smack to my girlfriend who was supposed to go on stage for the final song for the “Faygo Armageddon” and she chickened out and we ended up leaving before their set ended to beat traffic. I’ve done it twice and it’s the most fun thing ever. Just running around on stage throwing soda. Also shout out to Ouija for giving me his backstage pass so she could do it. 

Okay, so that’s it! Another Gathering of the Juggalos in the book. Gonna link some stuff below so you can see all my coverage. I actually have some photos in an article on Insider coming soon so I will link that here too when it’s out. (Update: It’s out.) Thanks for coming and I will see you juggalos next year!

 – Daily Beast – Rolling Stone – Brooklyn Vegan – Insider – Juggalo NFTs – NSFW Juggalettes – 

Now click here to see all the photos from Day 3 of the Gathering of the Juggalos in Thornville, OH. 

Whoop whoop! We are on to the second day and the third update of the 2021 Gathering of the Juggalos photos. Day two features another 200 insane juggalo images with the opportunity to lurk another 100 for a small fee. Sorry I am doing you like that but these are the times we are in. More on that in a minute, but now we gotta break day two down for you.

I spent the most time at the Gathering on Day 2. I got there early because Chris Hansen, yes that one, from To Catch A Predator, was going to be speaking. I saw him when I got there and asked if I could take his photo and then literally as I lifted my camera up they called his name. I took one bad photo of him but it ended up in Rolling Stone so what are you gonna do? I didn’t listen to a ton of the seminar because it honestly made me uncomfortable to watch 100 people listen to a talk about child sexual assault but he made it very clear he was down with the clown and considered himself a juggalo so that happened. He also hosted the main stage later that night. 

After his seminar the same tent hosted the Faygo wet t-shirt contest and I figured I had to cover that for you guys. Plus my friend Contessa aka Cunt Mafia was in it. She came with me to the Gathering in 2018 and decided she was a juggalo and has come back every year since and it’s amazing. She’s a musician and I got her in Rolling Stone too which was awesome. Anyway, Clownvis was hosting the wet t-shirt contest which made for even better photos, but it was in a horrible red tent which makes it a HUGE pain in the ass to color correct so instead of doing that I did what all bad photographers do and just made them all black and white. I also decided to only include a small selection of photos from the contest at the end of this gallery. The rest, including some VERY NSFW ones, will be only available on Girls of DBB. It’s over 100 photos in high res so it seems worth whatever it costs to join my site. There’s also a video from it on my OnlyFans.

Okay, after that there were bands. I apparently missed the first one and then Whitney Peyton was up next. She got really emotional about performing live for the first time since Covid and then she climbed the crowd to perform in the sky basically. I couldn’t help but dig her after that. Up next were a band called Knockout Kings who were filling in for a band who got Covid. They started with just three members on stage but then added three more as their first song went on and the stage got so crowded that they crashed into each other and knocked one of the guitar players over. After that was RA The Rugged Man whose music I legitimately like and he brought a bunch of juggalos on stage with him which was pretty fun. And after that was King 810 who I was not a fan of musically but they put on a good performance and as I have mentioned before that’s the important thing. Lastly was Ouija Macc who after ICP is the biggest artist on Psychopathic Records. I didn’t shoot great photos of him because the stage lighting wasn’t great but I linked up with him the next day and shot some portraits of him so those will be here tomorrow (or maybe Friday).

After Ouija we went back to the hotel again because I am pretty sure I had sun poisoning or something and we were fucking exhausted. And I think that’s all I got, except to tell you to buy my juggalo NFTs and to go look at some photos! 

Click here to see all my photos from Friday at the 2021 Gathering of the Juggalos in Thornville, OH!

I spent several hours today trying to organize these thousands of Gathering of the Juggalos photos I shot over the weekend into little categories of updates and I just couldn’t do it anymore and I gave up. I am going to organize these photos into just three more updates by day of the festival. That means today you are going to get over 200 images, all taken last Thursday. Tomorrow I will get up all the photos I took on Friday and on Thursday you will get all the photos I took Saturday. That’s the plan at least. If you haven’t already make sure you check out my last update, which was just my favorite portraits from the Gathering back when I thought I was going to break this up into a bunch of galleries.

Okay, so let’s talk about day one! I got there a couple hours before sundown because I needed a nap after a 7am flight to Ohio. The music on the main stage doesn’t start until six but I wanted to get some portraits before then so I did some laps and showed my girlfriend Shannon around. The festival was missing some of the elements like The Busey Beauties and Psychopathic Radio but it did have a bunch of giant dinosaurs that are meant for the upcoming Lost Lands EDM festival, but I guess you can’t really hide a dinosaur so the juggalos got to hang with them. 

The mainstage musical line up started with 9 Dead and then a dude named Nascar Aloe played and he barely sang any of the words to his own music but he put on one hell of a show so that’s all I care about. I have shot so many music festivals I honestly tune out the music and just pay attention to the performance and his was great. After that Kid ‘N’ Play performed. Seriously, that happened, and honestly they were really fun. DJ Paul from Three Six Mafia was after that and he’s always great. I’ve seen him perform a bunch at past Gatherings and one of the few artists at the festival I actively listen to. Vanilla Ice played after that. He was actually on ICP’s record label for a while and has a juggalo tattoo and has played the Gathering a bunch before. He was bitching about the internet and cancel culture and how great cops were but on the plus side he did bring out a Ninja Turtle. Lastly ICP performed their double length album Bizzar/Bizaar in its entirety. Or at least I assume they did because we were exhausted and after I photographed them we went back to the hotel. Sitting on my ass for a year and a half has not been great for physical being and I was pretty much dead by the time they played. 

Oh, I don’t know why I didn’t mention it earlier but Steve-O from Jackass was the host of the first night and he’s a perfect fit for the Gathering. He did a bunch of stupid human tricks and cut his tongue with broken glass and set his hair on fire. He also showed his butthole to the juggalos not once, but twice, per their request. Don’t worry I didn’t upload those pictures but I did put them on my OnlyFans as a joke since the same day OnlyFans announced they were getting rid of porn on their porn site. 

Speaking of NSFW stuff, there are a couple NSFW pics in this gallery but you can see all the NSFW juggalette portraits on Girls of Driven right now in high resolution. It’s not a ton of photos this year, but they do exist. 

Okay now it’s time for you guys to look at WAY too many photos. Seriously there are over 200 of them and my website is barely functional these days so good luck. 

Click here to see all the photo from Day 1 of the 2021 Gathering of the Juggalos in Thornville, OH. 

I just got back from Thornville, OH where I was shooting the Gathering of the Juggalos for The Daily Beast, Rolling Stone and Brooklyn Vegan… and of course this site. It was my 11th Gathering and I took it a little bit easy this year because I had my girlfriend with me and I still managed to shoot over 4000 pictures. I have so much stuff for you guys to check out but we are gonna start things off with the hits.

This update is just a gallery of my favorite juggalo portraits and that’s it. There will be so many more to come but I just wanted to get some stuff up today, link my incredible clients and announce the second drop of my Juggalo NFT series. Oh surprise, more NFTs. This juggalo series is going to be an ongoing series with each drop having a different theme and Series 2’s theme is juggalo portraits just like this update. In fact every NFT in Series two just so happens to be in this gallery. Oh, and did I mention these NFTs are very slightly cheaper? I wanted the first drop to be a little more expensive but for the time being they are going to be listed at .2ETH.

Anyway, I got so much juggalo madness coming for you guys this week so just hold on and I will be right back. Now go click some links below and check out all the photos that exist in the world already.

Juggalo NFTs

Daily Beast: The Gathering of the Juggalos Sees Steve-O, Chris Hansen, and a Horde of Crazy Clowns Take Over Ohio

Rolling Stone: Gathering Again

Brooklyn Vegan: The Gathering of the Juggalos 2021 in (NSFW) Pictures

Now click here to see all my favorite portraits from the 2021 Gathering of the Juggalos in Thornville, OH.

On March 1st, the 20th anniversary of Driven By Boredom, I released my first NFT. They were animated gifs of the Driven By Boredom logo. I released it primarily because the NFT community feels in a lot of ways like the early days of the internet and the community that exists around early 2000 websites that were essentially blogs before anyone was calling them blogs. But I also released it because I knew I wanted to make photography NFTs, but I wanted to do a trial run before I did them and I think I learned a lot.

I did 3 editions. I did a 1/1 that I sold for 2ETH which at the time was a little over $3000. I made it for me, I just wanted it in my collection, I didn’t think anyone would actually buy it. I then made an edition of 5 for .2ETH which was about $300 and then finally an edition of 20 at .02ETH for about $30. Amazingly the 1/1 was pretty much the first thing to sell. I sold a few of the other two as well, but I realized a few important things 1) Collectors want 1/1s 2) It’s probably a little too early for a lot of my fans. I had some real trouble trying to on board people. 3) Cheap NFTs are a hard sell because the gas fees to buy them are often too high to justify. Why would you pay $40 to own a $30 NFT? 

After the sale I took all that ETH and bought other NFTs with it. I wanted to be part of the community. I also started working on my next NFT. I didn’t see a big space for still photography yet and I thought animation was the way to go. I made a series of 5 adult themed animated photo NFTs and was getting ready to drop them in April when crypto crashed. It just didn’t seem like a good time. And then I waited longer, and waited longer, and I kept putting it all off because I was scared it wouldn’t do well and I didn’t want to make mistakes on the blockchain that would haunt me years later. You can take down a blog post, you can’t remove an NFT that you don’t own from the blockchain. 

During those months of me worrying about what to do and when to do it I have lost most of my ETH, learned more and I have seen photography NFTs become collectable finally. It’s a lot of landscapes that seem to be popular, but the idea that people want still photography got me very excited. I still plan on releasing my animated NFTs in the future, but with the Gathering of the Juggalos happening this week I felt like it was the perfect time to launch my first NFT with the biggest project of my career, the 12 years I have spent documenting juggalos.

The first girl I ever kissed was a juggalo. I mean she was really a punk but she liked the Insane Clown Posse. A lot of my punk friends did for some reason. They weren’t great musically but neither was most punk, but they were also hilarious and listening to them felt like watching a terrible B horror movie. They were the sonic equivalent to a Troma film. But when I went to college I didn’t know anyone who liked them and I didn’t really think of the band again until 2010.

When “Miracles” came out and everyone was making fun of it I found myself defending ICP. I was trying to explain that they were in on the joke and you just didn’t get it. At some point I Tweeted about how I wanted to go to the Gathering of the Juggalos that year and my editor at the Village Voice, Camille Dodero responded. She was in and we were going. We were willing to pay our own way but by the time we were done it was a cover story and changed both of our careers forever.

Since then I haven’t missed a single Gathering of the Juggalos. I have covered the event for dozens and dozens of clients including a lot of big ones. Of course I did, the Voice, LA Weekly, a cover for the Riverfront Times and a bunch of other Alt Weekly coverage, but also Rolling Stone, Vice, Playboy, Hustler, Kerrang, Daily Beast, Boing Boing, TMZ, and countless others. The last ever episode of @Midnight had a segment on my juggalo photos and The Late Show ran one of my photos last year. A thread I did about juggalos became a trending moment on Twitter and a photo I took of a butt with clown makeup on it has haunted me for years. I took the most famous photo of ICP without their make up and was the only photographer there when juggalos attacked Tila Tequila. If you do a google image search for juggalos it’s absolutely filled with my photos. I would guess that if you have ever seen a photo from the Gathering of the Juggalos there is probably a 40% chance that I took it. 

Long story short is that this is the most exhaustive project of my career and my life wouldn’t be close to the same without juggalos. They have welcomed me into their family and while I don’t listen to the music very often, I certainly feel like I am a juggalo myself after all these years… at least juggalo adjacent. I feel like this is a perfect place to get started with with my NFT journey and it’s a good way to give back to some of the juggalos in my photos.

I am holding 25% of the sale price of every juggalo portrait I sell for the subject of the photo. I own all these images and I don’t need to do that, but I feel it’s the only ethical thing to do. If it’s a photo of a bunch of people or a celebrity or if there are some people in the background of a shot I won’t be giving that out, but any primary person will have two years to claim it and I will be doing my best to contact them.

Now let’s talk about how the series works. There will be 17 drops (17 is a very important number for juggalos) and each series will have 5 1/1 images each with the exception the first and last series. The “genesis” drop will have 10 images and the last one is a surprise. I have no timeline for the series other than I would like to time the ending with my book release. 

I have a lot of ideas for this project if it is successful with both physical and digital rewards for the collectors of my work and some fun ideas that I don’t even want to talk about yet, but even if the project isn’t the hit I am hoping for I will still complete the series. I plan on building a website with information on every NFT I ever make at some point but I need to sell some of these things first. But I think NFTs are the future and even if a lot of the buzz dies out I will keep going. I am in this for the long run, just like I was when I started blogging more than 20 years ago.

Lastly we should talk about pricing. I think NFTs are very hard to price, but I know that if I was doing a 1/1 print I would sell it for several thousand dollars, but I also don’t really know how to do a 1/1 as a photographer. It would be like selling a negative which is something I would never do. NFTs give you a way to do that as a photographer that we never had before. So I do value these “jpgs”, as people like to derisively call them, fairy high, but I also want to sell them so I am hoping around .2ETH is a good place to start. As the series go I will be raising or lowering prices depending on demand but 9 of the 10 NFTs in this drop are going to be .217 ETH, honoring that lucky juggalo number once again. I also will be selling the first NFT in the series, a portrait of the Insane Clown Posse, for .517 ETH as it will be officially the first photo NFT I ever release. I don’t know if it will sell, but I am very glad to hold onto it in my collection if it doesn’t.

If you want to learn how to get cryptocurrency in order to buy one of these, you can read my last NFT post for a breakdown of how to do it. The easiest way is to to download an app called MetaMask and buy ETH directly from there. If you live in NY state or some other places with terrible crypto laws you will need to download CoinBase and buy the ETH there first.  You will need to buy more than you think you need because you will have to pay a fee to transfer it to MetaMask and another fee to mint the NFT. I am not exactly sure how much because it depends on gas prices, but they tend to be cheaper when it’s late night in the US. 

One final thing I am gonna drop down here because I know the environmental impact of NFTs is something people are concerned about… just do me a favor and google how much energy YouTube uses. You wouldn’t attack someone for making a YouTube video so don’t attack an artist for making an NFT. 

Okay, that’s it. Take a look at my Juggalo NFTs here. Happy collecting! 

And that’s a wrap. All my photos from the 20th annual Gathering of the Juggalos are up. I do have a couple more things coming that I did for other blogs but it sounds like they might not be up for a little bit so I will just add them to the links below when it is published, otherwise, this is everything. 

It was a wild year, and a bit of a throwback when things at the Gathering seemed a little crazier. I took a ton of photos and had a bunch of clients so it worked out really well. It was my 10th Gathering and hopefully next time you hear the word juggalo out of my mouth it will be because I am getting ready to publish my book cataloguing the last decade. I am pretty ready to retire from juggalo anthropology but you never know, they might just drag me back next year.

This gallery is over 300 images and is just everything I had left over. You can click below for that gallery, but then all my other juggalo coverage will be below that.

Complete 2019 Gathering of the Juggalos Coverage:

The Daily Beast: Inside the 20th Gathering of the Juggalos: A Weekend of Drunk Clowns, Public Nudity, and Total Mayhem

Boing Boing: Summer is over. Juggalos are forever. 

Brooklyn Vegan: Gathering of the Juggalos 2019: NSFW pics (ICP, GWAR, Geto Boys, more)

Merry Jane: Insane Cannabis Posse: Weed-Whacked Photos of the 2019 Gathering of the Juggalos

Cell Vision: The Gathering of the Juggalos

Driven By Boredom Coverage:

The Best Of The 20th Annual Gathering Of The Juggalos

Music At The 2019 Gathering Of The Juggalos

2019 Juggalo Fight Club

Mike Busey & The Busey Beauties Return

Night Juggalos

Burn Motherfucker Burn

The Rest Of The 2019 Gathering Of The Juggalos (This Post)

NSFW Juggalettes (Paid Site)

Now finally, click here to see the rest of my photos from the 2019 Gathering of The Juggalos.

More than a week after the Gathering of the Juggalos ended, we have reached my penultimate update. Later today or tomorrow I will get up the last post which will have links to all of my coverage as well as a huge gallery of images, and then we can move on with our lives. But I have a pretty good one for you before we get to that.

The last night of the Gathering of the Juggalos ends with a set from the Insane Clown Posse. For the 20th anniversary they played one song off of every album and EP they have ever released, ending with a song off their upcoming album, ironically titled Be Safe. During that song a small group of juggalos set a couch or two on fire in the middle of the crowd. Juggalos love setting off fireworks in crowds, and they love burning shit, so they might as well burn some shit in the middle of the crowd.

After ICP was over the fire was going pretty strong so I ran over there to take photos. People started carrying over picnic tables and grabbing chairs and really anything they could to throw in the fire. Eventually security ran over to put it out, but juggalos just started throwing shit at them and as soon as they ran out of extinguishers the juggalos started the fire up again. 

There was a good mix of reactions of juggalos to this because juggalos contain multitudes. You had the juggalos actively involved in the fire on one hand, and the ones yelling at them to put out the fire on the other. In the middle you had juggalos just resigned to them being juggalos “fucking juggalos” one said while shaking their head. “I guess we won’t be back here next year” was a comment I heard several times. At one point people just started chanting “We fucked up! We fucked up!”

Eventually shit got even worse when juggalos started throwing fireworks and eventually propane tanks into the fire. At one point a commercial grade firework shot out of the fire and exploded feet from a juggalo who didn’t even flinch. Others around him jumped out of a way like it was a hand grenade, but this one motherfucker just stood there taking it all in. I started laughing so hard I was crying and had to lay on the ground. In the very last picture below (but not the last picture in the gallery) you can see something explode in the fire which sent a juggalo flying. He was somehow fine but was nearly trapped under the picnic table he was carrying at the time. It was quite the scene. 

I of course used the opportunity to do a little photo booth and after I shot Khloe Kapri and a few other friends in front of the fire I had juggalos lined up to take their picture in front of it. It was pretty entertaining and I stuck around for a while, but eventually it was clear that this fire was never going to be put out, and it was going to become this Eternal Flame that was carried from Gathering to Gathering by juggalos with torches so I decided I had to finally leave.

As I was walking out of the Gathering I saw fire trucks lined up, but they weren’t entering. Juggalo journalist Camille Dodero told me later that the fire department didn’t enter the grounds because they viewed the juggalos as a threat to their safety which is a little silly because juggalos wouldn’t hurt them, but they sure as hell would throw some Faygo at them. Whoop whoop.

Click here to see all the photos from the insane bonfire from the 20th Gathering of the Juggalos.

I have three more juggalo posts to go. The last one might not go up until Monday because my last juggalo article goes up then and I was trying to time it with that so I could have a final list of all my published articles. That last one will just be an “everything else” post with over 300 images in it, so be on the lookout for that one. The second to last post I get up this weekend should be pretty cool too…. This one? Not so much.

I learned something new about my mirrorless camera this weekend… it is very bad at focusing in total darkness. The camera is great in low light, but in pitch black it doesn’t work it all. I turned on the little green auto assist light but it’s right where I hold the camera so my hand was always blocking it and then my lens is too long for it with the adapter to make it work with a mirrorless so it was a total fucking nightmare. I honestly have never been so frustrated with any equipment I have ever had in my life. Fortunately there aren’t a ton of situations where I am working in total darkness, but I know in the future I need to break out the old DSLR for that.

Long story short is that a lot of the stuff I shot at night looks like trash, but I did still shoot some cool stuff and there are almost 100 photos in this gallery so they aren’t all bad. As far as content goes, it’s all just kinda general madness and I don’t have a ton of stuff to say about it. There is some nudity so maybe a NSFW warning is in order but you are looking at photos of juggalos on a site that is mostly nudes so maybe that’s something you don’t need. Yeah, let’s just get to the photos.

Click here to see a bunch of photos of juggalos after dark from the 2019 Gathering of the Juggalos.

With another Gathering of the Juggalos comes another gallery of Mike Busey’s weird sideshow. He brings a bunch of fire breathing strippers and performers and a Puerto Rican genie and a giant man named Big LA and then convinces juggalos to do really dumb things on stage. It all makes for great photos and now you get a gallery of it.

The Busey crew was set up down the hill from the main stage and it was honestly a huge pain in the ass to go back and forth so I didn’t shoot a ton around their area as I have in the past, but I did shoot their stage show and it was nuts. They got cut off before it got really weird, but there was a dick tug of war and an ass sundae contest and a live sex show. It probably would have been much crazier (there was a sex machine bike involved) but they ran out of time. Their setlist ended with “butthole fireworks” so just imagine.

They also hosted the main stage on Saturday so I got a few shots from that including the return of the live sex show juggalos and them giving out hundreds of White Castle sliders which is always a good move.

A lot of these photos plus more public nudity from the Gathering can be found in high resolution on the Girls of Driven By Boredom so go sign up for that if you haven’t. Then go look at photos and I am gonna go eat some more Cuban food because I an in Miami.

Click here to see NSFW photos of Mike Busey & The Busey Beauties at the 2019 Gathering of the Juggalos.