Punk Becomes Poet

Joanne Latham makes a BIG impact in the world of "reader's letters" digest publications, particularly for "Response," a periodical featuring b/w photographs and illustrations throughout rainbow pages (many pages a different color).

As fresh a face as Joanne's, who is now teaching yoga in India (as was as recently as mid 2000s), was just what the men's magazine market needed very late 1970s, thus changing the attitude of the industry forever. The look of a woman when she's pissed-off has a certain appeal to those looking for it, and pair that with a bust rivaling those on ancient Chinese fertility stones and the result is a powerful statement of womanhood, to start. 

It seems Joanne was pissed from the beginning, as an erratic full-figured punk model who probably irked the rest of them not getting near the airtime as she, never really taking a strong advocative stance on what she did as a model. Her attitude towards nude and semi-nude modeling was apparent from the start, but was blatant to her hungry, drooling fans only four years into her career as a cover and poster girl. By 1983, editors were featuring layouts of the English gal, arguably the most prolific after June Wilkinson, admitting that she'd already reached the peak of her career. Obviously her golden era was early in the 1980s, as evidenced by the digests represented here, but her impact is one that can no longer be held, lasting throughout anything that came in her wake. 

Each of her appearances have the heir of irony, begging the viewer to wonder on what side of the bed she awoke the day of the shoot. Some of her sessions bespeak a downright angry bitch. Some of her sessions bespeak only the sweetest of girls-next-door eager to show you her recently discovered feminine form. Joanne is the brightest aura and the darkest enigma of eroticism in print. In and out of the biz as quickly as any, she began a website devoted to her modeling career, but it isn't currently maintained, and took her love of spiritual oneness to a level paramount to her previous endeavors, becoming a Buddhist and traveling to the countries of origin, a poet of spiritual transformation. After this, or maybe because of this, she lost much of the weight so admired in the pages of Penthouse, Response, Mayfair, Partner, Game, and the like, and we can only presume the same weight came away from that rivaling rack.

    


What the shit are you doing now, Joanne? Do you teach the ways of Buddha, the ways of ancient yogi to eager respondents, in lands so far from your uprising? Only those closest know the difficulties of your plight in the often thankless land of nude posing, but those of us who take in your sight with something more than basic ball-grabbing, Cro-Magnon impulse hurt in our hearts for your justification.



If she ever poses again for any reason other than travelogue candids, I hope to be the man with the camera. She will be snapped with admiration. She will be photo'd in pure easiness and will not be misused. Posing anyway she wishes, no spreading, no arching of the back (save that of the Down Dog or the panca of Namaskara A/B), no delicious presentation of her tan ass (an uncommon pose for Joanne), no colliding of 40+ tits, just the angelic English visage of a woman so pissed she laughs and we finally get Joanne to smile with life's happiness that SHE birthed, her own happiness.

A stunning woman ready to punch someone. 

All images presented created solely by the author of this blog, not copied from other sources.