By Dan Skip Allen
One of my favorite things about films like documentaries is that they tell stories about all kinds of different things.
Yes, sometimes they document celebrities and their stories, but other times, they document little-known people or situations that most people aren’t familiar with. That’s the case of Naked Ambition: Bunny Yeager. It depicts the story of a then trailblazing model and photographer Bunny Yeager. Bunny Yeager started her career as a model when she noticed there weren’t any female photographers, so she transitioned from being all pretty for the cameras to taking pretty photos instead. Once she started, she realized she was good at it, and she was able to sell her photos to a lot of outlets and magazines at the time. This was in the 40s through to the 60s and the early 80s. During this time, she discovered Betty Page. One of the most famous pinup models to this very day.
Yeager is also credited with the creation of the selfie which has become commonplace on Instagram and other social media sites of the I’ll. The way she took photos and placed models was very innovative for the time. Considering the various restrictions on nudity in these years she was given a lot of leniency until she wasn’t. She did spend a bit of time dealing with authorities before they realized she wasn’t doing anything worse than any other photographers were doing. In the 60s and 70s nude magazines like Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler were all the rage. She was just before her time in this type of sexual movement.
Like most documentaries, this one has a lot of talking heads. There are some famous people in the film like Hugh Hefner, the founder and owner-operator of Playboy, Larry King radio and television talk show host, Dita Von Tease burlesque performer and some of her fellow photographers like Bruce Weber, and women who were involved in the feminist movement she helped create back in the day Dian Hanson and Genevieve Turner, actress. All these people helped shed some light on who this woman was and what she represented. She was groundbreaking in her field and modeling in general.
With any good documentary, how the director decides to tell the story of the person or subject being documented is very important. This film uses a lot of archival footage of Bunny Yeager involved with photo shoots with gorgeous models, and plenty of scenes from Miami Beach where she lived and did a lot of her work and magazine covers. She was a prolific photographer whom everyone respected.
With any story, though there is a good side and a bad side and the bad side of this story is the fact that one of Bunny Yeager’s daughters wasn’t as big a fan of her mother or her work. She deemed this kind of work demeaning of a woman in her day and salacious. Obviously, not everyone felt this way because people like Sarahjane Blum and her archivist Ed Christian tried to preserve her legacy. There were art shows and a lot of her work was being auctioned off for big sums of money. Because of all the people who loved her and her work her legacy continues to this very day. This film doesn’t hurt that at all either.
