Edward Vince, editor-in-chief of Talc, on making a magazine for our time
It must be a strange time to be making porn magazines. The entire publishing industry grumbles about the impact the internet has had on business, but publishers of porn have been hurt more than most. Of course it’s hard to feel sympathetic for the porn barons and their seedy decline, but there’s another type of porn magazine out there.
As ever, independent publishers can be relied upon to do things differently, and a raft of magazines have hit the shelves bringing a different perspective on the old theme. I’m thinking the likes of Tissue, Extra Extra, and most recently, Talc, a magazine that seems more to be about porn, rather than a fully-fledged porno. I caught up with editor-in-chief Edward Vince to find out what Talc is all about. (NSFW images after the link)
Why make a porn magazine now?
That’s a very good question. We’re actually trying quite hard to not refer to it as a porn magazine these days.
It kind of originated as that – we wanted to market it in that way, as a soft porn magazine for men, because it came out of an observation about the sexualisation of contemporary culture across the board, from music videos, to publishing, to film, television and everything – it’s all becoming more sexualised.
And in our opinion men’s magazines are becoming quite homoerotic, because in many cases they’re art directed by gay men. For example Fantastic Man, which has that aesthetic sensibility and incredible production, or even Arena Homme Plus, which was a super-straight boy magazine that has become quite homoerotic. We’re not saying that’s a bad thing at all, but the straight man appreciates the same things and we think he’s being under-served.
That was the original catalyst, but over the year and a half that we developed the concept we realised that we didn’t want to make it for men only, so it became more generally an adult magazine. And it’s proven to be successful in that way – the readership is probably about 50 / 50 split.
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