jacques magazine

Now don’t let my sass diminish the final product here: Jacques Magazine is a sexy little retro (Playboy circa 1970) pin-up mag that’s well worth a look. I’m just a San Francisco girl having a really difficult time getting past the crunchy hipster outer shell and into the well-done retro softcore. I am watching the interview video and looking in the background for their fixies. I’m squinting my eyes and wondering how many times I’ve seen the photographer on Amish or Hipster? I am so distracted wondering why they’re wearing clothing left over from a Mormon polygamist compound raid that I forget to look for the titties. That’s a bad sign. Then again, I recall that in the FLDS, the clothes are supposed to “differentiate between the righteous and the evil.” (It’s the same in The Mission where saggy knitwear caps differentiate which fifth-wave coffee producer you align yourself with — exactly the same.) The whole time, I can’t tell if they’re looking into the camera, down (at us loser uncool enjoyers of not-always-tasteful-porn), or deep down into their navels, never to return.

It’s refreshing to get a little cup of porn with a double shot of condescending. And the final product is pretty. Even though IT’S NOT PORN. Don’t get hard or wet, because that would not be cool. Just look at the naked chicks and shrug. I’m just hoping this leads to hipster BDSM porn, where the white belt finally gets its day in the sun, if you know what I mean. Yesterday, the NYT licked Jacques like a $25 bacon-maple-vegan cupcake:

(…) Mr. Leder continued snapping Ms. Nola — raising her head, facing the sun, lifting a leg — until his camera suddenly stopped clicking. He looked at his 1965 Canon Pellix and spotted the problem. “I’ve got to get some film,” he said.

Film?

Mr. Leder is no ordinary pornographer. Along with his wife and editor, Danielle, the bearded, flannel-wearing Mr. Leder is the creator of Jacques, an upstart adult magazine in Brooklyn that reinterprets vintage Playboy in the age of 3-D porn and GPS hookups.

Joined by a small but influential roster of new pinup magazines — published in places like Amsterdam and the Lower East Side — Jacques is offering a self-conscious throwback to the magazines of the late 1960s and early 1970s, before the days of silicone implants, Photoshop and streaming HD video.

Begun in May 2009, Jacques dishes out nudity with a knowing wink that speaks to the kind of man who prefers his meat grass fed and his denim raw. The models are bigger, curvier and silicone free. The settings evoke a wistful vision of middle-class America — a playground in Chicago, a swimming pool in Villanova, Pa. The resulting images look more like vacation snapshots than studio portraits.

It’s a highly stylized aesthetic that evokes a bygone age of Polaroids and Kodak Instamatics. Mr. Leder shoots on 35-millimeter film, uses only existing light and never retouches or digitally manipulates a photo — blemishes and body fat be damned. “A lot of quote-unquote porn is just simply disgusting,” Mr. Leder said, offering his view of the adult entertainment industry. “It’s so cheap and so vulgar, it just turns everybody off.”

His cultural influences are mid-period Hugh Hefner and Norman Rockwell. (…read more, nytimes.com, via The Jailbreak, thanks mentisworks)

* Jacques Magazine (blog) (jacquesmag.blogspot.com)
* Jacques on Vimeo (vimeo.com)

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