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| Yeager, Bunny, Self-Portrait, 1950s. |
For last week's "Pho·tog Friday: Pop Quiz" post, we looked at an iconic image taken by the renowned pin-up photographer, Linnea Eleanor "Bunny" Yeager. Born in 1929, Yeager was also a pin-up model. Having experience both in front of the camera and behind the lens allowed her to really connect with her subjects in a manner that many other pin-up photographers of her day were not able to do. Further more, as a female photographer taking images of female models, she was able to make her subjects feel more comfortable and confident. Yeager described her early career as a photographer as one who took pictures of "nudes for the world's leading men's magazines and calendar companies". Yeager also described her work as an "intimate study of feminine beauty".
Yeager grew up just outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania although when she was seventeen, her family moved to Florida. After high-school, Yeager enrolled at the Coronet Modeling School and Agency. From there, she began working as a pin-up model in Miami. Yeager appeared in over 300 magazines and was one of the top photographed models in the country in the 1950s. She often boasted that she did not wear the same outfit twice for a photo-shoot and sewed many of her own outfits.
In
1953, Yeager enrolled in a photography class at a vocational school.
For one of her assignments, Yeager photographed Maria Stinger; her image
ended up on the cover of Eye magazine in March of 1954. She
learned to perfect the use of a fill flash when photographing her models
outside in order to lighten the shadows that occur from hard light.
She was also one of the first photographers to shoot her models outside
in natural light, which is a very common practice today.
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Yeager, Bunny, Maria Stinger, 1954.
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Also in 1954, Yeager met an
"up and coming" model named Bettie Page, who had been posing for "under
the counter photo sets specializing in sadomasochism" (Colker, LA
Times). Yeager saw a lot of natural talent in Page and began to
photograph her in a more wholesome manner. During this year, Yeager
took over 1,000 photographs of Page that helped make Page the
most famous pin-up model of the century. One of the most famous
photographs that Yeager took of Page was shot in the same location as
the image she took of Stinger, also with cheetahs. In 1955, Yeager took a nude photograph of Page wearing a Santa Hat and mailed it off to Playboy. This was the image that turned Yeager's photography career around. "I figured because they were new they might pay attention to an amateur,
and that's what happened," Yeager told the London Telegraph in 2012 (Colker, LA Times).
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| Yeager, Bunny, (Image of Bettie Page), (Photo of Bettie Page for Playboy), 1954, 1955. |
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Yeager shot extensively with Playboy and she discovered many models throughout her career as a photographer. Yeager's work also appeared in Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Pageant, Redbook and Women's Wear Daily. In 1962, Yeager worked on the set of the James Bond film titled Dr. No where she photographed actress Ursula Andress in a bikini:
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| Yeager, Bunny, Ursula Andress, 1962. |
In 1964, Yeager published a book titled How I Photograph Myself, which was published by A.S. Barnes & Co.
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| Yeager, Bunny, Self-Portait, ND. |
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01. Colker, David. Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles Times, n.d. Web. 18 July 2014.
02. "Bunny Yeager." Wikipedia. Wikipedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 18 July 2014.