Linnea Eleanor “Bunny” Yeager embodied the contradictions of midcentury America. The photographer, who died in 2014 on the age of 85, was a flirty exhibitionist and a suburban housewife. She was a busy breadwinner and a mom of two. She flouted the social decorum of ladies of her time, but she was married to a cop. She was additionally one of the vital profitable pin-up, or “cheesecake,” photographers within the nation.
Dennis Scholl and Kareem Tabsch’s documentary Bare Ambition pays tribute to Yeager, denuding the restricted, and limiting, skilled choices obtainable for ladies of her time. Like photographer Lee Miller earlier than her, Yeager was a vogue mannequin fairly accustomed to performing for the digital camera. In contrast to Miller, who produced among the most important photojournalism of World Struggle II, nonetheless, Yeager constructed a profession capturing bombshells frolicking on the seashore or cuddling with cheetahs whose coats matched the fashions’ string bikinis.
Bettie Web page in Bare Ambition
A lean (willowy?) 70 minutes, Bare Ambition is a part of the latest documentary pattern that seeks to canonize as artists creators who had been excluded by the elite of their time, typically attributable to sexism and racism. Whether or not Yeager was truly ignored by Twentieth-century artwork historians relies upon partially on whether or not one consists of the pin-up style inside the broader sphere of photographic portraiture. For individuals who do, together with myself, the query is: How did Yeager’s pictures honor the distinct character, materials situations, and standing of her topics?
The most effective instance would appear to be her 1954 portraits of Bettie Web page in a safari park close to Miami Seaside. Whether or not coyly peering over her shoulder or dangling from a tree with a knife between her enamel, Web page seems like she’s having a blast, comfy in her bronzed pores and skin and duly pleased with her lithe, curvy physique. These pictures, which Yeager despatched to Playboy journal, would finally launch the 2 girls into stardom, and into an ongoing artistic collaboration. Playboy’s common publication of Yeager’s work — and her personal promotion of the model — led to a interval of fame and fortune, each of which the movie blithely celebrates with out reservation.
Bunny Yeager in Bare Ambition
On this instance, as in its title, Bare Ambition appears to recommend that virtually all the things Yeager did was praiseworthy as a result of it was enterprising. It’s simple that she was an industrious expertise who dared to be a photographer at a time when few girls excelled within the subject. However does this make her a essential artist in her personal proper? Of this I’m much less certain, primarily based on her bigger oeuvre. Yeager herself appeared disinterested in making artwork, although she was keenly attentive to creating magnetic industrial pictures. What’s indeniable is that her meticulous, woman-forward method engendered an archive of fabulous pictures, wherein the nude feminine topic typically appears precisely that — a topic — as a lot as a sexual object. “You felt like you were with a girlfriend,” shares Nani Maka, one in all a number of former fashions recalling the photographer’s mischievous persona.
Regardless of its hagiographic tone, Bare Ambition is compelling when it examines how Yeager’s ebullient photographic method to feminine nudity was matched by her rejection of midcentury conservatism. Even when they adhere extra to the ideas of business than nice artwork pictures, her pin-up portraits function time capsules for an period wherein feminine sexuality was saved separate from “respectable” girls’s self-presentation. They’re additionally a reminder that ladies can discover actual pleasure within the act of posing for the digital camera, of being in a physique and understanding that this physique is taken into account stunning. As Yeager mannequin Marcia Valibus, who handed away after the movie was made, stated: “It looked like I was having fun.”
Bunny Yeager in Bare Ambition
Bare Ambition is taking part in in choose theaters nationwide.
