Jacques Magazine is a small publication created by the now-estranged husband and wife duo: Daniele Leder and Jonathan Leder. To supply myself with some context, I began writing this review after watching an awkwardly tense interview featuring Daniele and Jonathan that delved into the magazine’s conception and a general overview of its direction, the intentions behind it, and other more elusive insights into the uncomfortable dynamic of their relationship. (Mostly) Jonathan talked about the desire to create images harkening back to “when Playboy was good.” Of what few words Daniele did manage to contribute in the interview, she solidified where the basic common interest for both of them split and went in entirely different directions. The intersection where they met seemed to simply be the desire to photograph and feature attractive, naked women. However, Daniele spoke to a time before photoshop, and the need for there to be an alternative publication to show what a woman “really is.”
Flash forward a few issues, and you have a cheating husband who ran away with the last covergirl, a hiatus of the magazine for an indeterminate amount of time, and finally, a completely reconfigured magazine under the sole art direction of Danielle.
Jacques Magazine #9, “The Betrayal Issue.”
The cover of the magazine breathes provocative, the “Not for sale to minors” and the beautifully and inefficiently sized star tit censor both nice, kitschy touches to an otherwise overtly sexualized magazine cover. The magazine itself is one part eroticism, one part nostalgia, and a whole bunch of beautiful. The cover model “Melanie Dawson“, is interviewed in a three page “Q & A” style interview in which she talks about her body, identity, and her first time modeling: this. She is not only busty, but she is natural, curvy as hell, and un-photoshopped in the folds of this magazine.
The magazine, as I see it, is successful in what it has set out to accomplish. There is a deep sense of something personal, soulful– and an uneasy breaching of public vs. private. There is an unapologetic display of an eroded marriage, of betrayal, and of a personal identity and life squished. Still, this is not merely the product of wounds licked, but an accumulation of years of what sound like suffering, a next step, and perhaps most importantly, an empowered phoenix rising from the ashes; made whole again by self and appreciation of the body, sexuality, and all that is “the woman.”
Jacques Magazine can be found at some Independent Magazine Retailers in the NYC area and retails for $15 in the “Good Ole’ USA.”