‘Naked Ambition’ Brings Bunny Yeager’s Photography to a 21st Century Audience

Earlier this year, San Francisco’s own Carol Doda was honored with Topless at the Condor, a documentary recounting the dancer’s fame as North Beach’s first topless performer and the hardships she faced after her heyday. Now comes Naked Ambition, a film that captures the life story of Bunny Yeager, a photographer and model who created some of the most iconic pin-up images of the 1950s and ’60s.

Naked Ambition is careful to pay tribute to what made Yeager so special. Though attention early in her career came from being dubbed the “world’s prettiest photographer,” the documentary explains in detail just why her work was so special at the time and why it continues to endure now. The film also demonstrates the ways in which her photographs and stylistic choices have impacted popular culture in the decades since.

As seen in Dennis Scholl and Kareem Tausch’s film, Yeager didn’t merely shoot images that titillated, she made sure that each of her models’ personalities had space to shine through. Her ability to put women at ease and to present their nudity in joyful, celebratory ways was born from her own experiences as a model in the 1940s. It was Yeager’s inherent humor and playfulness that transformed Bettie Page from an underground fetish model to the leopard-print-clad icon she is most commonly thought of today. Yeager’s own work with self-portraits also broke new ground.

“I think it’s so important that she was a bombshell pin-up girl,” burlesque star Dita Von Teese notes in the film. “It really made all the difference in how she photographed other people.”

One of the most fascinating elements of Naked Ambition is the way in which Yeager managed to walk a line between sexually liberated creative and 1950s domestic goddess. Though dedicated to her two daughters and to building a suburban home in Miami, Yeager also had zero qualms about taking photos of women in various states of undress for publications like Playboy. (Yeager was one of the magazine’s first regular contributors and first female photographers. She counted Hugh Hefner as a close personal friend.)

Interviewees in the documentary include cultural commentators, Yeager’s friends and family members, individuals tasked with safeguarding Yeager’s legacy, and models with fond memories of working with the photographer, including Marcia Valibus and Nani Maka. There is also wonderful archival footage of Yeager at work, as well as some words between her and Bettie Page recorded in a 1993 conversation for Interview magazine.