Shock magazine debuts Tuesday

Does this magazine interest any of you? I tend to not click on links with images I know are disturbing. I won't even click on the Shock magazine link given in this article.



LINK

Gross-Out Magazine Shock Comes To The U.S.

May 25, 2006

By Daryl Lang

French picture magazine Choc, known for publishing photos of gory accidents and celebrities caught in states of undress, is about to launch a U.S. edition with the backing of a major magazine publisher.

A slightly cleaned-up, American edition of the magazine, called Shock, goes on sale Tuesday, apparently with the hope of attracting the same young men who made "Jackass" a hit on MTV.

Publisher Hachette Filipacchi Media is promoting Shock as a blend of print, online and mobile content. It already has a web site where readers can submit their own photos and videos. The magazine will be published monthly and, officially at least, targets male and female readers between 18 and 34.

The print edition of Shock is driven by big, bold photographs, mostly from wire services and photo agencies. "Life magazine for the new millennium," is how editor in chief Mike Hammer, formerly of Stuff, described Shock in a recent Wall Street Journal article.

Shock's masthead lists Cherie Cincilla as the photo director, Scott St. John as a talent coordinator/photographer and Stacey D'Alessi as a photo researcher.

Through a spokesperson, Shock editors declined to be interviewed for this story, though the company did provide an advance copy of the magazine for review.

The first issue of Shock is a medley of photojournalism essays, paparazzi, and upsetting images including a self-immolating protestor and a child held hostage with a blade to her throat. Shock borrows the celebrity tabloid look of its French counterpart, but with less nudity; it's more PG-13 than R.

This issue has just five advertisements, for JVC, Bowflex, Girls Gone Wild, a cell phone service and a film school.

The magazine opens with a two-page spread on the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl meltdown, showing portraits of people made sick by the disaster. The photos are by Robert Knoth, who shot an essay on Chernobyl for Greenpeace, and distributed by ZUMA Press.

A cover story comparing the war photography of the Vietnam and Iraq runs eight pages and includes work by the likes of James Nachtwey and Larry Burrows.

There's also an eight-page, black-and-white photo essay on the Ku Klux Klan by James Edward Bates, shot several years ago for Baptist Press and distributed by ZUMA.

In a column called "Story Behind the Photo," photographer Fernando Medina describes a classic sports photo of Michael Jordan he shot in 1998.

Mixed in with all this are the photos designed to "shock." Witness a corpse photographed decomposing over twelve days, a double-page spread of bloody chicken heads, a feature on celebrity butt cracks and a story about Chinese soldiers undergoing rectal examinations.

And then the magazine turns its attention to sick and disabled people.

A spread on a Florida doctor with no legs who plays golf sitting on a stool is headlined "Stay in Stool!," makes a pun on the golfer's "handicap," and says "he's clearly no two-stump chump."

Shock runs a short Q-and-A with "The Polio-Stricken Dancing Transvestite," an extremely thin dancer from a Marilyn Manson video who is apparently game to be portrayed like a sideshow act.

Currently, the Shock web site is running parody ads, including this one: "GET AYDS, Lose Weight! You'll feel better and look better with AYDS – an appetite suppressant." (AYDS was, in fact, a diet supplement before AIDS was the name of a disease, but one wonders how many Shock readers will know that.)

If that's your kind of joke, Shock may be your kind of magazin