Was checking out books in Helsinki and noticed this huge zine so-called magazine
NICO.
C. 250 pages in full color, thick matte paper. Subtitled "confessions: eroticism in media".
While it indeed is part of this booming "lifestyle" / art / eroticism kind of thing, with "refreshing" attitude. Like their kind of repulse statement:
"We inform, we entertain, we inspire.
We are Maison Moderne - Luxembourg's leading and award-winning media group.
We create magazines, books, digital content, events and broadcast TV.
We publish self-initiated projects and we create multi-channel, branded content for clients."
I kind of relate more to mission statements like "unzip, go"!
Nevertheless, this magazine issue #6 includes plenty of interviews of makers of new erotic magazines. It may be slightly towards fashion, or feminism, or mens lifestyle or gay lifestyle. Featured for example S-Magazine, Irene, Jacques, Pantyhose, Butt, etc etc.
General attitude appears stubbornly opposed to anything "pornographic". Most interviews tend to revolve around questions where to draw line of art/erotica vs. pornography. And they make their stand very clear. Of course, who could blame, when levels of imagination of generic mainstream porn is close to non-existent. But fuck, if someone would actually has SKILL, IDEAS, MODELS and FUNDS to do something like this, but full of hard core,
THAT would be refreshing. Now we are basically holding in hand womans magazine who feels revolutionary about showing little bit of ass-cheeks. While in reality just about any fashion magazine today, includes equal amount of playful nudity.
Despite all being said, pretty good book if you can get it for 25 euro cover price. Over here price is much more. It's much more rare to find decent interviews of makers of ehm.. "erotica", so magazine works for that. But some cases like the collage artists interviewed in the book, who makes kind of Philip Best type collages (read: pasting 1 square picture on top of background image), boasts how much time was spent on "finding just right magazines from internet", it's like...
oohh please! I'm sure that typical 50's/60's french-esque pin-up mags demand little more effort than buying latest Hustler, but "spending much time on internet" and then doing nothing else than picking up favorite page to paste over background. Interview THAT level artists on magazine? pfff...
You can browse few folds of magazine here:
http://www.nicomagazine.com
