Bunny Yeager’s legacy in Naked Ambition (2023)
A review of the recently released documentary directed by Dennis Scholl and Kareem Tabsch
Bunny Yeager is a legend, but not a well-known one. All I really knew about her personally was that she was a former model herself and the photographer who made the pinup queen Bettie Page famous. A few years back, I’d learned about how Doris Wishman recruited some of Yeager’s models for her nudist films, and more recently found out that Yeager herself was on the set of some of those films, taking promotional photos. That connection is what sparked my interest in this documentary about Yeager and her life.
Naked Ambition ignores Yeager’s youth and childhood completely, leaving out her beauty pageant experience and education, and very little of her modeling work is shown apart from her self portraits. The majority of the documentary focuses on the height of her photography career in the 1950s and 60s, focused almost entirely on the pinup work she did. Being made posthumously, we never get to hear from Yeager herself outside of some archival clips. Instead, the directors interview her children, her granddaughter, a few former models, and other artists and celebrities, including the wonderful Guinevere Turner, burlesque queen Dita Von Teese, and for reasons which are largely unclear to me, the late Larry King. King gets an unusual amount of screen time as he tells a completely unrelated story about being a DJ in the 50’s and leaving during his job to hook up with a woman. That bit feels like a total waste of time here, although I guess it highlights the sexually charged atmosphere of Miami in those days, which Yeager was very much a part of.
Bruce Weber also appears. Upon seeing his name, I was excitedly thinking that he had some relation to model and nudist legend Diane Webber, who Yeager also photographed. This wasn’t the case: Bruce Weber is a photographer (and director) himself, famous for his fashion photography and work for Calvin Klein in particular. He’s also allegedly sexually harassed some of his models, allegations publicized prior to the making of this documentary, making his presence here a little uncomfortable.
Speaking of predators, the late Hugh Hefner also appears, which shouldn’t have surprised me given that Yeager famously shot for and made good money from Playboy, but his appearance felt like a jump scare here. I don’t know, it was enough to make me question every male perspective that showed up as well as the two male directors themselves.
Yeager’s pioneering pinup work is discussed in depth, highlighting her style of shooting outdoors, her technical skills, the models she’d handpick, how she emphasized their energy and personality in a way no other photographer would, and it’s all worth talking about. Of course it’s also notable that she had experience on both sides of the camera in a time where most photographers were men who had never done any modeling themselves. Turner in the documentary says there’s a joyousness, a celebratory quality to Yeager’s work, and it’s right on the money. That is why her work endures to this day, and you see it in the numerous photos shared throughout. These pinups don’t just appeal to men, but to women too, and it’s the women here who have the most interesting things to say about Yeager’s work and life. The men have so little to add themselves.
Something that’s been on my mind after reading about it in Annabella Pollen’s book Nudism in a Cold Climate is the intersection of glamour photography, burlesque, and nudist media. Pollen points out how the British nudists were against burlesque and glamour, understandably due to the emphasis on sexuality, but also because they thought glamour in particular was fake, that you weren’t seeing the real person in the photos. There’s good evidence for this argument late in the film, when we see footage of an elderly Yeager posing for photos. When the actual photos are shown, her face is completely smoothed out and free of wrinkles, looking weird and plastic.
Pollen also points out how models who posed for the nudist magazines were frequently glamour models, art models, and dancers, and the photographers who shot them had their work published just about anywhere they could, with the same photos in nudist publications also showing up in dirtier books. As mentioned above, Doris Wishman populated her nudist films with the same models that Yeager shot, and burlesque dancer Blaze Starr leads one of those movies. So many of my friends who model for my figure drawing group are dancers and circus performers, many of whom dabble in burlesque themselves, and as of this writing I’m in talks with a local burlesque studio about hosting figure drawing with their dancers modeling. Nudist films in general are considered exploitation, lumped in alongside the raunchier stuff, as evidenced by Something Weird’s extensive catalog.
I suppose it really signifies how we have such a damn hard time separating nudity from sexuality. I don’t really have a strong perspective on it myself, or a conclusion, it’s really just something I think about a lot in exploring this media and creating my own nude art as a nudist who dances and interacts with the performance world myself.
Naked Ambition doesn’t only focus on Yeager’s work, of course. Her personal life is discussed in depth, especially by her daughters, and their split opinion on their mother’s career makes for some interesting tension. There is a lot of time spent on the death of her husband Bud Frank by suicide, a tragedy that it’s clear none of them ever really recovered from. While the cultural shift into the 1970s is covered, including the rise of Larry Flint’s Hustler and an obscenity lawsuit against Yeager, her attempts at doing more risque, hardcore material during this period isn’t shown, and we instead learn more about her attempts at singing, teaching photography, and other means of trying to make money as her pinup style fell out of fashion.
All in all, this documentary tries to cover as much as it can within a limited runtime of 75 minutes, and so we mostly just get to see the broad strokes. All of the elements mentioned above could have been delved into more deeply, but it’s clear that Yeager, her life, and her work were simply too tremendous to be done justice in one documentary. That said, it’s still very much worth watching, if only to get a taste of just what a pioneer Yeager was as a photographer and as a person.
Additionally, while this is neither here nor there, only one male nude photo is shown in the entire runtime, and I wish I could know more about it. Surely it’s not the only one Yeager shot, right?
Naked Ambition saw its first release in 2023 with select screenings at film festivals, but it just received a wider theatrical release in September of 2025. It is now available to rent or purchase digitally across most major streaming platforms if you’d like to see it for yourself. 🪐
Just one nit-pick: Bob Guccione started Penthouse magazine; Larry Flint started Hustler.