This New Book Takes Us to a Mexican Witchcraft Market for Magic Soaps
Love, luck and healing are promised in this journey of folklore and religion.
Bold visual storytelling, visceral beauty and witchcraft come together in this new photobook. Titled JABON: Magic Soaps of Mexico, the book pairs hyper-saturated photography with bright graphic design. This is the perfect addition to any collection.
Published by creative agency The Midnight Club, the imagery is shot by Maisie Cousins and brought to life in the pages by Stephanie McArdle’s graphic design. The book documents 20 ritual soaps with nostalgic packaging, shot in a Mexican witchcraft market. The soaps promise different powers, including love, luck and healing.
Each image is paired with an invented backstory that reflects the vibrant chaos of Mexican markets and the human need for resilience in the face of cultural tensions. The slightly unsettling photography takes compositions of food, flowers, waste and other objects to create a strange tension between appeal and repulsion. This is not documentary photography, it’s an immersive journey of folklore, religion and decay.
Through McArdle’s graphic design sensibilities, the soap stories become their own characters. The designer says of the soaps, “Their lo-fi, vintage packaging. The array of strange powers and religious instructions. I feel incredibly lucky to have found Maisie, then The Midnight Club, who helped turn my little daydream into a reality.” Eclectic colors come together in layered images and rough edges that evoke both the feeling of a scrapbook and a crisp magazine. The dual-language book is the perfect addition to your coffee table.
The book is now available to pre-order via The Midnight Club website.
For more cool coffee table books, check out the latest one from Nadia Lee Cohen.
