Former model’s best work behind camera
Yeager carved path in field men controlled
MIAMI — Bunny Yeager was a photographer at a time when men dominated that profession, but the model turned pin-up photographer used that to her advantage when photographing women in the 1950s and ’60s.
She was able to make everyday women, from stay-athome mothers to airline attendants, feel comfortable enough to bare it all.
In the mid-1950s, she helped jump-start the career of thenunknown Bettie Page with her photo in Playboy. More than five decades after Yeager shot the well-known stills of Page in a leopard-print bathing suit standing next to a real cheetah, 40 framed prints of her work are now on display in a gallery in Miami.
“They all wanted to model for me because they knew that I wouldn’t take advantage of them,” Yeager, now 83, said of her models. “And I wouldn’t push them to do nude if they didn’t want to do nudes. It wasn’t a day when nude photography was prevalent.”
Wes Carson, a photography instructor at the Miami International University of Art & Design, said the way women were “surveyed” in Yeager’s photographs was distinct from her male counterparts’ work.
“When I look at her work, the women have a different demeanour,” he said. “They are more confident. They are in charge of their sexuality, where if you look at someone else’s work the women are much more dismissive and demure.”
Last year, Yeager, a Pennsylvania native, published the coffee-table book Bunny Yeager’s Darkroom and is working on another book that will include her photos of Page.
Yeager, whose real name is Linnea Eleanor Yeager, was one of the most photographed models in Miami during her early career.
Soon after taking a photography course at a local college, Yeager turned the camera on herself as she posed in bathing suits she handmade for her 5-foot-9 frame. Her self-portraits were turned into a book, How I Photograph Myself, in 1964 and many of those photos adorn the walls of her Miami gallery. The prints range in price from $1,200 to $3,000.
During the 1950s and ’60s, Yeager was one of the top fashion models and photographers, publishing about a dozen books. Yeager continued to work, but over the past decade, several magazines began to struggle or went out of business. Yeager was no longer in demand.
“There was a big portion of time where I hadn’t been doing anything,” Yeager said of her hiatus. “It wasn’t that I was retired, it’s just that nobody wanted my photos. I had no requests. No inquiries. Nothing. It was like I didn’t even exist.”
But in 2010, the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh held an exhibition of her work. Now, there is the Miami exhibition.
“I haven’t got used to it yet,” Yeager said. “And I still get that little tingle when I see the photos on the wall.”