GEORGE HELD:
Your bra & panties
hanging on the door—
Do Not Disturb
George Held is a poet and a retired English professor from New York City. He wrote this haiku after seeing Saul Leiter’s erotic photograph above on Blogfinger. George has contributed many poems to Blogfinger.
Saul Leiter was a pioneer in color photography, mostly for fashion magazines, but he also took thousands of black and white images of nudes in his New York apartment. You might say that he was an aficionado of naked women.
Of course his artist’s eye found secret imagery.
Leiter, a life-long New York artist, died in 2013. This photograph above is from the cover of a book which he published of nudes called In My Room.
Joao Gilberto “Outra Vez” (Tr: Another Time)
Beauty, in all its forms of fun and fashion, must be explicitly celebrated.
As a gay man, I went through sex-shaming, and it had a worse effect than the imagery and ideas itself. But sexual imagery enhances life, and hurts no one, and it is time to celebrate what even the beautiful work so diligently to project and enhance.
Who are we to deny them that? As long as no harm no foul, it is to be appreciated, as a truly medicinal segue into health and happiness.
I enjoy these Haikus very much, please keep them coming!
The photographer of this image, called a “girlie photo” by Diane, is Saul Leiter (1923-2013). He is known mainly for black and white street photography, but his sensitive images of women, often posing nude, and many of whom he knew personally, are found in an art book published this year called “In My Room.” That is the third of 3 such collections of his work appearing recently.
This month Photograph magazine posted a lead editorial on Saul Leiter’s work, and they used this image (erotic, but not a nude) which we borrowed for our George Held poem.
Leiter joins a prestigious group of artists known for photographing the female nude including Helmut Newton, Jan Saudek, Ruth Bernhard, Annie Leibovitz, and Robert Weston, among a long list of others.
Diane ought to learn how to spell 4 letter words before she dabbles in art criticism.
Note: Older Blogfinger posts may say that comments are closed, but that is WordPress. Our readers can comment at any time by sending an email: Blogfinger@verizon.net. Of course, only selected comments are posted.
“Looks like we never here the end of ‘Haiku’ now. Another girlie photo.”
Another time, indeed. Love that samba.