RIP - Bunny Yeager

[MohandasKGanja]

(Twitchy, I hope this is in the right forum.)

Bunny Yeager was a landmark pinup photographer. And one of the first women pinup photogs. She was a former model herself and was famous for photographing Bettie Page. I really liked the look of her shots. She even made many of the swimsuits that her models wore. I didn't include the whole LA Times article, but the link is below.

Bunny Yeager dies at 85; photographer of Bettie Page pinupsÂ*-Â*Los Angeles Times

Bunny Yeager dies at 85; photographer of Bettie Page pinups

Bunny Yeager, a model turned pinup photographer, took famed pictures of Bettie Page. (© Rizzoli New York)

Bunny Yeager had success as a model in Miami in the 1950s, but she wanted to be a photographer. She saw her chance when she met the little-known Bettie Page, who had modeled for under-the-counter photo sets that specialized in sadomasochism.
Yeager took a somewhat more wholesome, holiday-themed photo of Page — nude except for a Santa hat — and in 1955 sent it off to fledgling magazine Playboy. "I figured because they were new they might pay attention to an amateur, and that's what happened," she told the London Telegraph in 2012.


The photo launched her career as one of the most successful pinup photographers, often with Page — who became an international sex symbol — as her model.
Yeager, 85, died Sundayin a nursing facility in North Miami. The cause was heart failure, said her agent, Ed Christin.
In recent years, along with a revival of interest in Page, who died in 2008, there was much renewed appreciation for Yeager's photography. Her work was the subject of several gallery and museum shows, such as the "Bunny Yeager: The Legendary Queen of the Pinup" exhibition at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh in 2010.

Yeager worked with numerous models over the years, but said that Page was uncommonly cooperative.
"It was like us doing a dance together," Yeager said in an interview last year in the Sun Sentinel newspaper in Florida. "I would snap my fingers and she would do exactly what I told her to do: 'Stand on your toes. Kick your leg in the air. Jump in the air.'"
There were pictures of Page frolicking on the beach in Key Biscayne, dressed in a bikini that Yeager designed and made. Another locale was a wild animal park in Boca Raton, Fla., where many of the animals were not caged. Page, dressed in aleopard-print swimsuit, was shown sitting among real cheetahs.

Yeager came to be admired for her use of natural light, sometimes enhanced by flash even in daylight, to make a model's skin look luminous. But unlike nude photographers whose depictions of women were hyper-sexual and pumped up, Yeager found sensuality in a more natural look.

In the 1970s her career as a photographer ground nearly to a halt. Magazines were getting more graphically anatomical. That was over the line for Yeager, who prided herself on making models comfortable and earning their trust. "You had magazines like Penthouse ... kind of smutty," she said in the Sun Sentinel interview. "They had girls showing more than they should."
"I'm not doing it to titillate anybody's interest," she continued. "I want to show off how beautiful my subjects are, whether it's a cheetah or a live girl or two of them together."




DAVID COLKERcontact the reporter

[roslyntaberfan]

A woman before her time