Words: when less is more

I’m not normally a big fan of magazines without many words. Photography and illustration is generally what pulls me into a magazine but it’s the writing that makes me want to stay there, so anything without a decent bit of reading just feels kind of lightweight.

But Saucy is a very welcome exception to the rule. It doesn’t have much in the way of words, but the ones it does use are clearly very carefully chosen.

Written, edited, photographed and designed by journalist Kristen Taylor, it’s based on the time she spent in Miami five years ago, and from the start her words are designed to unseat and intrigue. She is, she says, an unreliable narrator – in the last five years her memories have faded and all she has left are “fragments, rendered imperfectly at each recall” (this coming in her editor’s note, one page on from a quote taken from Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation).

But there’s more than fuzzy memories going on here.

Sometimes her words are poetic, suggesting drama in her Miami life.

Sometimes they’re playful, like this doctored image at the start of the magazine.

And throughout her photography intensifies the mystery, creating a vision of Miami as an unreal place, all bright colours and exoticism.

It only takes a few minutes to flick through the whole thing, but I’ve been back to it again and again. Can’t wait for the next issue to come out.

Like what you see? Take a look at the Stack Facebook page for more spreads from this issue