Miami’s own pinup queen, Bunny Yeager, who passed away earlier this year, receives a fitting photographic tribute at Wynwood’s Center for Visual Communication.
A self-portrait Bunny Yeager took in her backyard, from her book How I Photograph Myself, published in 1964
“I remember her exact words,” recalls Barry Fellman of the day in 2011 when Bunny Yeager reopened her photography studio next to Fellman’s own Center for Visual Communication gallery in Wynwood: “Barry, I’m ready to be famous again!”
A pioneer of erotic portraiture in the ’50s and ’60s—as well as an internationally renowned pinup model in her own right—Yeager in her work mixed a sense of playful hedonism with an unabashed female athleticism. The results are as striking today as when they first created a sensation in the Eisenhower-era centerfolds of Playboy, Cavalier, and Figure Quarterly. “I’m not doing it to titillate anybody’s interests,” Yeager told the Sun-Sentinel last year. “I want to show off how beautiful my subjects are, whether it’s a cheetah or a live girl or two of them together. That’s more important to me than anything.”
Bettie Page posing with a cheetah. The photographer frequently shot her subjects (including herself) in nature.
Yet when Fellman first befriended her in the mid-’80s, Yeager had long since hung up her camera. She was living quietly in Miami Shores and publishing the comparatively staid Entertainment News and Views weekly newspaper. The explicit turn of men’s magazines in the ’70s held little interest for her. “There was no longer any mystery and magic to it, so she’d stopped shooting,” Fellman explains.
Self-portrait kneeling on the beach with a Rollei camera.
Yeager’s fortunes shifted in the ’90s as a fresh generation of cheesecake enthusiasts rediscovered her vintage shots of model Bettie Page—most taken around South Florida, from the sands of Key Biscayne to an abandoned Boca Raton zoo (cue the cheetah)—and then her own inventively composed self-portraits. That wave of interest has practically exploded since Yeager went back into the studio: Both Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum and the NSU Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale have exhibited her work; this December will see Palm Beach’s Gavlak Gallery feature her self-portraits at its Art Basel Miami Beach booth.
Page at Miami’s Funland Amusement Park, photographed by Yeager.
For Fellman, the attention is bittersweet in light of Yeager’s death from heart failure this past May. “She was realistic about the way popularity ebbs and flows in the art world, and she was excited about returning to what she loved to do,” he says.
Still, Fellman is soldiering on with an exhibition the pair had already begun planning together. Entitled simply “The Best of Bunny,” it showcases the highlights of her career, from a recent photo shoot spotlighting a new burlesque talent to a cache of previously unseen self-portraits from her original heyday, all hand-printed by Yeager herself. However, in gazing at her self-portraits 50 years on, today’s theory-wielding critics have been as apt to name-check the through-the-looking-glass photography of Cindy Sherman as the louche milieu of Yeager’s onetime employer Hugh Hefner. Which is fine by Fellman: “She always knew her work was special,” he says. “There’s a directness and honesty in it that is indelibly Bunny.” “The Best of Bunny” is on view at the Center for Visual Communication, 541 NW 27th St., Miami, 305-571-1415